Plenty of ink has been spilled on the evolution (or, depending on who you’re talking to, de-evolution) of Adam McKay, who has gone from the “Saturday Night Live” writers room to the auteur of such likably goofy Will Ferrell vehicles as “Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights” to the Oscar-winning purveyor of message movies like “The Big Short” and “Vice.” His critics—and there are plenty of them,—have accused McKay of committing the ultimate crime for a comic artist: taking himself too seriously, inhaling his own press clippings, and deeming himself not merely the co-creator of Ron Burgundy, but a somber thinker and social commentator.
For the record, this is not the problem – such transformations are part and parcel of the artistic experience, particularly among contemporary comic performers and writers, who find the lines between the funny and the tragic blurring with increasing, distressing speed. “The Big Short” and “Vice” are clever pictures that attempt to puncture and undress the complexities of contemporary history with comic devices and Brechtian devices, and frequently succeed. No, the problem with Adam McKay is not that his aims became loftier; it’s that somewhere in the midst of the process, he decided that his audience was stupid.
This inclination first revealed itself in the astonishingly smug mid-credit scene of “Vice,” but that was a brief detour, outside of the motion picture proper, and thus easy to dismiss. His new film, “Don’t Look Up,” is that scene stretched to 145 minutes. It’s satire with a sledgehammer, and it’s absolutely exhausting.
It starts promisingly. Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is an astronomy Ph.D. student whom we first meet doing busy work in the lab. Then she sees something. And yelps. She calls in her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who freaks out as well. Kate has spotted a comet, headed straight for planet Earth; it measures roughly five to ten kilometers wide, and when it makes its direct hit in six and half months, it will be “an extinction-level event.”
“Let’s not get dramatic here,” warns the head of NASA, and for a while, McKay makes hay of the bullshittery of politicians in a crisis, as Kate and Randall are rushed to Washington D.C. so they can sit in a waiting area for hours, denied the opportunity to warn the president that they’re all going to die. (The high cost of vending machine items turns into a pretty good running bit.) Once they’re finally in the room, President Orlean (Meryl Streep) and her chief of staff/son Jason (Jonah Hill) barely register what they’re saying, much less act on it, and in these sections, McKay’s screenplay deftly pinpoints the particular way politicians will pervert language to blunt impact of things that will hurt them at the ballot box.
Frustrated, Kate and Randall make their case in the mass media, and boy oh boy does “Don’t Look Up” fall apart once it becomes a Media Satire. You see, no one cares about, or even hears, what these two meek scientists are saying about the end of the human race because they’re bad on television, and also because they’re all vapid morons who are more interested in tracking the heartbreak of a pop star (Ariana Grande, doing her best). “Maybe the destruction of the planet shouldn’t be fun!” Kate thunders, to the happy-chat hosts of the film’s “Morning Joe” stand-in news show, and it becomes clear that McKay isn’t going for sophistication here; he’s skewering media with all the sophistication of a cranky old man screeching in a Denny’s about “the lamestream media” or, I’m sorry, “fake news.”
The rest of the film plays like that – like the work of a screenwriter who should’ve spent a little less time on the Occupy Democrats Facebook page and a little bit more, I dunno, observing human behavior. McKay and co-story writer (and frequently intolerable political pundit) David Sirota wrote the script as a response to climate change inaction, and it was about to go into production when COVID hit – so McKay used the delay period to turn it into a broad metaphor for COVID fear and denialism. There are hints here of how a COVID satire could work: a scene where Kate’s Republican mother insists, “Your dad and I are for the jobs the comet can create,” a commercial for an information helpline that pointedly apes the “in these uncertain times” language of pandemic-era marketing.
The performers give it their best shot. Streep is clearly having a good time, but her character is a nothingburger – McKay seems to have asked, “What if Donald Trump was in Hillary Clinton’s body?” and decided that was all the joke he needed. (Also, at this point in our every-day-is-a-week existence, spoofing Donald Trump feels about as timely as a “Where’s the Beef” joke). Hill does manage to generate some laughs, combining all the worst traits of all the Trump children into one sniffling, horny dipshit, and some of the swipes at cash-and-carry politics land; when Mark Rylance’s eccentric tech billionaire wanders into an important briefing, Hill shrugs, “He’s a platinum level Eagle Donor, so he has full clearance.” (Rylance, for his part, nails the specific peculiarity of these Jobs/Musk/Bezos figures.)
DiCaprio is fun to watch, playing against type, all nervous and nerdy. Lawrence is invested, and it’s good to have her back on screen, but she’s given nothing to play beyond cynicism and frustration. (She does get the one truly great line, in response to a skater kid’s conspiracy theory: “They’re not even smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.”) And Timothée Chalamet brings a good, weird energy to his brief appearance. (However, life in prison for any filmmaker who underuses Melanie Lynskey this egregiously.)
But McKay’s sneering script and sweaty direction undercut them at every turn. “Don’t Look Up” fails miserably as satire because satire requires some degree of comic exaggeration and ironic incongruity. However, the response to the existential threat of COVID was impossible to satirize because no fiction could be more ghastly and ridiculous than our reality. And everyone in McKay’s film acts exactly as we expect them to, from the second they appear onscreen, so every single target is hit in the most obvious, broad, predictable manner possible. It doesn’t have anything meaningful to say about the human condition because there aren’t any humans in it – just caricatures.
And then, on top of all of that, McKay attempts a big, jarring turn to earnestness and righteous indignation – and can’t sustain it. When DiCaprio’s once-idealistic professor, who we’ve watched transform into a horny media whore, thunders at the faux-Joe-and-Mica about how “we can’t all agree on the bare minimum” and wonder “what the hell happened to us,” it’s like a Bugs Bunny cartoon suddenly veered into solemnity, and then, in the entirely unearned closing scenes, sentimentality. It’s cheap and crass, and by the conclusion, downright infuriating. [D+]