Luca Guadagnino is renowned for luscious, sensory filmmaking which bestowed him cinematic auteur status almost immediately. Most recently, he made viewers feel like all their bones were about to shatter in the hypnotic “Suspiria” and eroticized stone fruit in “Call Me by Your Name.” The prospect of his debut collaboration with HBO excited scores of fans eager to see Guadagnino’s immersive skills stretched out into an hours-long story. Unfortunately, that story—“We Are Who We Are,” a series Guadagnino co-wrote with Paolo Giordano and Francesca Manieri—is mostly devoid of the artistic filmmaker’s passionate, sensuous sensibilities and instead bloated with pretension and solemnity.
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“We Are Who We Are” stars Jack Dylan Grazer (the hyper boy from “Shazam!“) as Fraser, an oddball, probably gay, poetry-reading 14-year-old who moves from New York City to an Italian military base with his mothers, Emily (Chloë Sevigny) and Maggie (Alice Braga). Bitter and jaded about the move —as well as basically everything else in the world, given he’s full of teen angst, though the kind that’s also too aloof and apathetic to actually get angry about anything —Fraser develops a keen interest in his neighbor Caitlin (Jordan Kristine Seamón), a popular teenage girl who may or may not be a closeted transgender boy.
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There is a long cinematic history of dubious teenage pretentiousness (see: the Sofia Coppola films that don’t work). That doesn’t mean pretentious teenagers do not exist: Who among you, in the midst of your adolescence, did not pretend to like art house films, grandiloquent poetry, problematic male novelists, or The Smiths, in some grand quest to seem more interesting? (Because if you are reading this, a review of Luca Guadagnino’s new miniseries, you must have been a pretentious teenager.) The difference between you and the kids in these films is that you likely experienced emotions beyond ennui, anger, and horniness.
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Not so in “We Are Who We Are,” which attempts to confront ideas of identity, confusion, and loneliness, but trudges along at an uninvolving emotional flatline, only deviating from total numbness when Fraser threatens to kill his mother or random frank nudity occurs (kudos at least to making no thing about full-frontal male genitalia). Guadagnino has directed his young cast into performances that would better serve an Ambien commercial. For instance, Seamón, who plays Caitlin, has a lot to work with: She wants to experiment with her gender presentation, but her mother (Faith Alabi) urges her into feminine clothes and her father (Kid Cudi) is a domineering Trump supporter (making a Black family put on MAGA hats by a non-American filmmaker in 2020 isn’t the greatest look). But Seamón’s performance offers little of this internal conflict, if it offers any big emotions at all. It feels wrong to blame such frustrating placidity on Seamón herself, though, when each of her castmates seems similarly lobotomized. Even Grazer, a talented young performer perhaps best known for bringing sparkling comedic relief to Andy Muschetti’s “It” films, is insufferably inert and ineffectual and very obnoxious when he’s not. In the four episodes offered to reviewers, Grazer fires off just one (one!) witty retort. That brief quip feels like finding a centimeters-deep puddle in the middle of the desert (a teacher says to a student at one point, reading something aloud in class, “Start over again, with a little more conviction, don’t be afraid of these words,” which could easily double as a directorial critique of many of the series’ low-energy performances).
The script actively worsens this issue, demanding that its teenage cast say things like, “They think we’re weird,” “Q: Why do you read poetry? A: Every word means something.” “Is this what we’ve become?” and “I have nothing” in casual conversation. This is Guadagnino, Giordano, and Manieri’s interpretation of Gen Z, the same generation that has coped with a global pandemic by producing as many memes and TikTok skits as humanly possible. It is a generation tinged by melancholy, sure, but their primary mode of expression is dark humor – not, in the case of sullen protagonist Fraser, eye roll-worthy soliloquies comparing novels to fast fashion.
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Add in a predominantly jazz/classical soundtrack, Guadagnino’s penchant for custom title sequence fonts, and each often-aimless episode inexplicably bearing the same name (“Right Here Right Now” I, II, III, etc.), and you have a veritable art house dream that actually goes wrong, the sort of production better suited to a skit mocking NPR devotees and people who love “the ballet.”
The problem is not that “We Are Who We Are” demands too much of its teens – it expects too little of them. The kids of “Euphoria” are unrealistic enough to wear “Ms. 45” and “True Romance” Halloween costumes, but at least they feel real, lived-in, and still care about, like, Instagram (not to mention we’re emotionally invested in them and their well-being). Even the perfectly-drawn Elio, the protagonist of “Call Me By Your Name,” was plausible enough in his pretension because he a) lived in the 1980s b) had academics for parents, and c) was still kind of a little shit. “We Are Who We Are” feels like what it is: European artistes taking on a demographic into which they have zero insight and very little to add. It is, at best, a meandering, mildly lyrical meditation on arrested development – at worst, a head-scratching misfire by an otherwise major talent of cinema. [C-]