‘Malcolm & Marie’ talk too loud and say too little

I hesitate to quote James Baldwin in a review of a film that would appear to fall far short of Baldwin’s stature because it is so often selectively and deliberately taken out of context. But while I was watching Malcolm and Marie, the memory of a passage from his book-length essay The devil finds work kept harassing me. The passage focuses on the question of identity in a broad chapter that reflects bitterly on the various functions that the black characters, through white gazes, have played in the film over the years, from the black maid to Guess who’s coming to dinner? to the moving (and sometimes murdered) black child in works like Sol Stein’s novel Child care. Baldwin’s lyrics cut more forcefully on late scene Malcolm and Marie where Marie (played with effort by Zendaya), giggles like Malcolm (exasperatedly played by John David Washington), lashes out on a Los Angeles Times review for his latest film.

Malcolm’s complaint covers everything from race and gender politics to screen violence, A-capital art, C-capital cinema and who can tell some stories. At the end of his passionate flood of consciousness, he runs out of steam, tries to shed light on his explosion and walks away. Then he starts screaming again. This, in fact, is the movie. Each new argument is almost magical in the way it materializes out of nowhere and then just as suddenly disappears.

“Identity,” Baldwin writes, “seems to be the garment with which one covers one’s nudity; in this case, it is better if the garment is loose, much like the dresses of the desert, through which dresses her nakedness can always be felt, and sometimes discerned. This confidence in her nudity is all that gives the power to change your dress.

The writing is so bad it almost seems intentional.

As bald as he is in Malcolm and Marie, writer-director Sam Levinsion attempts to sublimate the notion of identity, especially in regards to how he or not he consciously uses the race and status of his two leads to comment on what he might not be. given credit for saying if he had to do it in his own white skin.

Here sincerity would win out over offense, the seriousness of Levinson’s art resisting any harsh take against him. After all, the main characters launch difficult and superficial monologues that stand up to hypocritical and technically hypothetical film critics (the ubiquitous “white woman of the LA TimesReferenced throughout is a plausible nod to Katie Walsh who, IRL, filmed Levinson’s previous film, Assassination Nation), racism in the film industry, misogyny and slut shame, and other long-drawn-out pontifications with insignificant consequences. Some have described it as a cunning, judgmental filmmaking. Brian Tallerico, in his review of Malcolm and Marie for rogerebert.com, writes: “I’m almost in awe of the way it isolates the movie from bad reviews because fans are just going to say the reviews are responsive. Nice game, Levinson.

But it’s really not hard to criticize a movie like Malcolm and Marie, despite the alleged minefield Levinson creates for the people who would. Lovers’ Quarrel Room piece starring two popular actors hurling insults at issues within their own industry, the film would have something if the points raised stung or touched on new ideas, industry secrets or meaningful reviews.

But the writing is so bad that it almost seems intentional. Everyone speaks in full, unbroken sentences, which charity viewers have compared to theater dialogue. “Do you know how disturbing it is to be able to compartmentalize so much that you can abuse me by eating mac and cheese?” Marie asks. “You can’t hang everything on identity,” says Malcolm (in a monologue that’s much, much longer than the rest of this excerpt). “You can’t say I brilliantly subverted this trope because I’m black, but I fell for this one because I’m a fucking man!” Identities are constantly changing. Does the male gaze exist if the filmmaker is gay and not straight? And to what extent? Instead, Levinson’s project raises broader questions about his aesthetic and thematic choices, questions which, especially when considering how the casting and writing of his two tracks are used, more or less succinctly undermine. the whole company.

‘Malcolm and Marie’ sits somewhere between a virtuoso student film and a Gucci commercial, photographed and staged to maximize aesthetic glamor while unfolding what’s meant to be messy, revealing scenes of domestic tension.

In terms of its packaging, the seriousness of Malcolm and Marie was built into production long before Netflix released it as an award contender. Shot in a 35mm black and white film, the polished and austere texture of the film immediately highlights its thematic intentions: nothing that Malcolm or Marie says is as simple as it sounds, everyone’s intentions are gray. Admittedly, this tactic offers a momentary beauty, a tactile quality so often absent from television and cinema. But Malcolm and Marie sits somewhere between a virtuoso student film and a Gucci commercial, photographed and staged to maximize aesthetic glamor while unfolding what’s meant to be messy, revealing scenes of domestic tension.

One of the movie’s biggest mistakes is believing that the only two people we see in the movie are interesting, and failing that, being portrayed in an interesting way. But Zendaya and Washingston spoil the film by gravely misjudging their skills as actors and, given their involvement behind the scenes, their creative sensibilities.

Levinson, as a white writer and director, received inordinate attention to be fully responsible for a film like Malcolm and Marie, the one who puts white words in the mouths of black actors whose characters criticize white people. It’s a conversation that usually bothers for its hijacking, but here it hits something. Zendaya and John David Washington’s involvement as uncredited producers and co-writers has been widely dismissed as background information, even though they have lent both their money and their tacit approval to the film. Instead, the focus has been on Levinson, who has the ability to deflect criticism thanks to the enthusiastic collaboration of his stars. Denial aside, Malcolm and Marie is still Levinson’s creation, a creation that does not signal an end-of-career misstep, but a bizarre opportunity for others like him to delude themselves into believing their “faith in the collaborative process of filmmaking” or other, as he said The independent, will absolve them of any choice made.

But there have been other more egregious authors of this kind of synergistic performance before. For example, the creation of white artist Joe Scanlan, Donelle Woolford, a fictional black female artist who has been portrayed in different ways by Namik Minter, Abigail Ramsey and Jennifer Kidwell.

Manifested by the desire to “exploit the historical and cultural references” of an imaginary artist, the character of Scanlan finds himself at an uncomfortable and bizarre bond of impulses. Woolford’s biography is slippery, changing dates and places of birth based on where she presents herself. the program. The women who “played” her asserted Woolford rather than distance themselves, emphatically pointing out the collaborative nature of the project and how their involvement was often overshadowed by Scanlan.

In his book White niggers, Lauren Michele Jackson, cultural critic and assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, dissects both Scanlan’s motivations and the broader effect of “Donelle Woolford” on the art world. “The problem is and is not Donelle because Donelle does not exist,” she writes. “Donelle can only respond through the mind and body of her guardians.

In Levinson’s case, it might be true that you don’t get a movie as loud as Malcolm and Marie, as visibly ambitious and sober, as myopic focused on his only two characters, without at least some measure of star agreement. But the genesis and the execution remain where they always were. Less interesting than the content of what Levinson might be trying to say is his motivation for doing it that way. He probably subscribes to the same belief that writer Lauren Oyler recently said in a profile for The cup, that “If you are someone that nobody criticizes, nobody takes you very seriously.” And he might be right, but not for the reasons he wants.