PICK OF THE WEEK
KINDS OF KINDNESS
General release
Fair play to Yorgos Lanthimos: after two Oscar-winning mainstream hits – The Favourite (2018) and Poor Things (2023) – the Greek surrealist sensation might have been expected to turn away from the weirdness and mythic sensibility that made Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2015) and, especially, The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) so gripping.
Instead, he has gone back to his roots with a deeply strange and wonderful movie that – from the opening beats of the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) – explores power, brutality, purity rituals and the anthropology of belief with greater subtlety, imagination and oddity than ever.
Kinds of Kindness, the director’s ninth feature film, is a triptych with a world-class ensemble cast, headed by Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons (especially good), Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley.
The first part, titled The Death Of R.M.F, features Plemons as a corporate stiff, Robert, who follows the every whim of his boss Raymond (Dafoe) – until one demand too many leads him to rebel. In R.M.F Is Flying, Plemons plays Daniel, a police officer convinced that his marine biologist wife Liz (Stone), having gone missing, has been replaced by a sinister doppelgänger.
In the final section, R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich (told you it was weird), Plemons and Stone are embroiled in a New Age cult led by Omi (Dafoe), in search of a woman who can raise the dead.
Violence, the caprice of the gods, the eternal human struggle for dominance: these are the themes to which Lanthimos and his co-writer, Efthimis Filippou, return in their collaborations, and with compelling success. He is the Buñuel or Dalí of our era, and to be treasured as such.
TV
DOUGLAS IS CANCELLED
ITVX
In what I suppose should be called a “post-modern” or “meta” example of contemporary discourse, Steven Moffat’s four-part drama had, well before release, triggered furious commentary on the existence (or not) of cancel culture; the representation of Gen Z in the series; and the propriety of jokes about “microaggressions”.
In fact, Douglas Is Cancelled is a well-observed and often subtle exploration of generation gaps, the insidious misogyny that has been camouflaged rather than banished, and the transformative power of social media.
National TV treasure Douglas Bellowes (Hugh Bonneville) faces career extinction after a tweet is posted alleging that he made a sexist joke at a wedding. He denies it all. Will his co-presenter, Madeline Crow (Karen Gillan, excellent), stand by him? And his wife, tabloid editor Sheila (Alex Kingston)? “Please delete these messages,” she advises her husband. “I work with people who hack your phone.”
Fire-fighting the burgeoning scandal are creepy producer Toby (Ben Miles) – “The truth is useful, but I prefer something a little more balanced” – and Douglas’s hilariously craven agent, Bently (Simon Russell Beale). But what counts, in the end, is Douglas’s working partnership with Madeline, who grew up idolising him, and his readiness (or not) to be honest when she asks what really happened.
BOOK
Good Chaps: How Corrupt Politicians Broke Our Law and Institutions – And What We Can Do About It, by Simon Kuper
Profile Books
Perfectly timed as a guide to what the new government should do, Simon Kuper’s follow-up to the superb Chums is a snappy, incisive account of the debasement of British politics by money and influence.
“Since the day [Boris] Johnson walked into Downing Street in 2019 and began looking for donors to pay for new wallpaper,” he writes, “there have been so many financial scandals in British politics that even the most diligent corruption-watchers cannot keep up, as I discovered when I became one”.
That’s true. In his inventory of misdeeds and meticulous analysis, Kuper – one of our finest writers – shows that a system that used to depend on the patrician decency of “good chaps” broke down long ago, and that the legal framework to deal with corruption in politics is woefully toothless. As Russian oligarchs, tycoons from the Gulf, and the “libertarian buccaneers” of Mayfair hedge funds have all discovered, influence is cheap here, too: “you could become chummy with the British prime minister for the price of an Italian mayor”.
There is plenty of detail here to leave you in no doubt of the urgency of reform – and Kuper is cautiously optimistic that it may be on its way. Do check out last Friday’s episode of The Two Matts, in which Matt Kelly and I talk to him about the book (and much else).
