Sometimes, the increasing relevance granted to a particular artwork can outrun the work itself. When Cory Finley (Bad Education, Thoroughbreds), the New York-based filmmaker and playwright behind Landscape with Invisible Hand came onboard the film in 2020 (the project had been in partial development since 2017), he could not have foreseen the unprecedented rise of AI in cultural discourse, or the isolating, widescale impact that the COVID-19 pandemic would have on our society later that year. Such worldwide occurrences are happy (or in the case of the coronavirus, distinctly unhappy) accidents, the types of fortuitous subtexts that can overwhelm a piece not sturdy enough to carry them. Finley’s ambitious third feature, which is adapted from M.T. Anderson’s acclaimed 2017 novella of the same name, is one such case: a sporadically inspired but ultimately tepid film that collapses under the weight of its innumerable and provocative themes.
Set in the mid-2030s, Landscape with Invisible Hand is a science fiction film, though certainly not in the way you’d expect. Much of our world remains the same, that is except for the massive flying cities that occasionally float overhead, depositing trash down to the Earth below, or the inconvenient fact that the planet has been taken over by a technologically-advanced race of slimy, coffee-table-shaped aliens called the Vuvv. The Vuvv’s invasion is not violent, but financial. Offering expedited solutions to many of the world’s most pressing economic issues, these unlikely conquerors have taken hold of humanity through means of supply and demand. They grow artificial meat in labs which is sent down to Earth in sodden cubes as a cheap alternative to natural products – think Soylent Green if it wasn’t made of, well, people. Teachers, and later entire schools, are replaced by small devices that can be placed on a person’s temple, putting the student in a VR environment where they’re fed propaganda by a friendly cartoon alien. The top 1% may benefit from this free-market dystopia, but the resulting lack of industry and jobs has left most of humanity impoverished and depressed. Sound familiar?
Our guide through this strange, but maybe not-so-new world is Adam (Asante Blackk), a precocious teenage artist whose paintings serve as the film’s distinctive chapter marks. He lives a relatively quiet existence with his sister, Natalie (Brooklyn MacKinzie) and their single mom, a former lawyer named Beth (Tiffany Haddish, playing against type), as they escape by a decent middle-class lifestyle amidst the alien takeover. Things get complicated when Adam offers lodging to a houseless girl at his school named Chloe Marsh (Kylie Rogers), leading her to move in with her father, Mr. Marsh (Josh Hamilton) and hostile brother, Hunter (Michael Gandolfini). Adam and Chloe share an apparent mutual crush and decide to monetize on their burgeoning relationship by recording their day-to-day existence as part of a “courtship broadcast.” You see, for all the Vuvv’s technological ingenuity, they have no concept of love (they reproduce asexually) and will pay top dollar to snoop in on human couple’s courting rituals. Every hand-hold, kiss, and high school dance becomes fodder for commodification, and it soon becomes apparent that Adam and Chloe’s relationship may not be as genuine as it first appeared. For their alien viewers, this is a problem.
There’s a lot of incident in Finley’s film, but not much story. An extended portion of the second act depicts a marriage between a human and a Vuvv, the latter of whom insists on modeling their relationship on a 1950s sitcom, though he can only communicate in strange smacks and claps. There’s also a thread concerning Adam’s artwork, and a satirical subplot depicting the Marsh’s increasingly pathetic efforts to acquiesce to Vuvv culture. These sequences can be quite funny and antithetical of genre expectations. The film’s style is a blend of bleak realism and camp, and Finley attractively blends modern sci-fi stylings with kitschy B-movie aesthetics to visually-stimulating effect. Unfortunately, none of this actually adds up to much. As its novel but listless story plods along, Landscape gradually loses whatever energy it started with, failing to imbue its ideas with any tension or dramatic stakes. Important relationships are unexplored or completely abandoned, such as Adam’s relationship with his absentee father, played in his sole scene by William Jackson Harper. There’s no coherent emotional thread to latch onto amongst the film’s distracted narrative, only worsened by a complete lack of any resolution.
Though tonal liquidity is a distinctive element of Finley’s style, its employed less effectively here than in his prior work. In a jarringly violent scene, a depressed high school teacher blows his brains out on the school’s front lawn, but the darkness of this moment is never matched anywhere else in the film. Furthermore, though the extraterrestrial takeover presumably affects the entirety of Earth’s populace, the scope is perplexingly limited to Adam’s hometown. Attempts at gravitas in the story’s third act instead come across as preachy and obvious, mostly because none of the film’s tantalizing threads are ever fully delivered on. There are distinct themes of capitalism, the commodification of art (think ChatGPT if it looked like a slimy platypus), and the alienation prompted by rampant consumerism. It’s frustrating to watch Finley’s film come so close to evocatively blending these topics, only to retreat from them whenever it threatens to make a real impact. Like the Vuvv, themselves, it seems incapable of locating the heart of what makes these people — and their art — meaningful.
Photo courtesy of MGM
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