An uptight middle-aged lady takes her Brooklyn family on a weekend trip to a beautiful country house on Long Island in Leave the World Behind, a dark, laugh-out-loud psychological horror.
The movie very self-consciously introduces us to marketing executive Amanda Sanford (Julia Roberts) and her roiling uptightness and anger by having her happily pack for a spur-of-the-moment family road trip as she explains to her college professor husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) that she spent the morning thinking about how much she hates people — and there was another, emphasis-adding word in there before “hates.” She’s rented a house for the family — which also includes teen son Archie (Charlie Evans) and just-turned-13 daughter Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) — in a hamlet called Pointe Comfort. The drive turns rural enough that Rose loses internet on the iPad where she’s binging Friends but the house is a design dream, with a large kitchen and a lovely pool. Amanda smiles sunnily as she meanders through the tasteful, dreamy master bedroom and has the same look of contentment as she loads purchases from the cute grocery market into her car, her mood only slightly darkening as she sees a local (Kevin Bacon) load up his truck with canned foods and water bottles. But all is well as the family lies out on the beach, enjoying the post-season sparse crowd and the sun and the view of the water where a large tanker ship seems strangely close. Doesn’t that seem close, Rose tries to say to her family several times but is ignored until Amanda, looking up from a snooze, is all, hey that’s really close and it’s not stopping. The family grabs their bags and rushes away just as the large ship runs aground up onto the beach.
Once they’re home, they find the internet is out and their phones don’t have service but everything basically seems normal and the kids jump into the pool while the parents make dinner. Later, Amanda and Clay are playing Jenga and enjoying wine when there is a knock at the door. G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali), decked in a tuxedo, and his 20-something daughter Ruth (Myha’la), dressed in an evening gown, are at the door. G.H. graciously apologizes and calls Amanda by name when he introduces himself as the man she emailed with when she rented the house. This house is his house and they, G.H. and Ruth, have driven out to stay the night. The night or maybe longer — there’s a blackout in the city and he can’t walk the 14 floors up to his city apartment. With all the traffic and chaos, he doesn’t want to go back to the city and even offers to refund Amanda her money, unlocking a drawer and handing her cash, so that he and Ruth can stay in the in-law apartment in the home’s basement. Amanda is, er, the most printable description is probably “a brittle jerk” about this request and doesn’t entirely believe G.H.’s claims to own the house. Ruth finds her father’s extreme politeness to this snotty lady and her family excessive, especially since they are asking to stay in the basement of their own home. Eventually, though, everybody goes to bed with a general idea that they’ll make sense of things in the morning.
“Making sense” is not a task easily accomplished. After a vague emergency alert, the TV offers nothing but fuzz. No phones, no internet. Clay’s attempt to drive into town is disastrous without GPS. Rose keeps seeing weird animal-related things. But at least Archie seems pretty happy when Ruth comes down to the pool in her bikini.
Ruth and Amanda’s instant dislike of each other, Clay’s clumsy attempts at being useful and friendly, the kids’ them-focused problems (Archie wonders if he can visit his girlfriend vacationing an hour away, Rose just really wants to see the last episode of Friends), G.H.’s fears about what’s happening, Amanda’s whole personality — it’s all really well-executed in this movie that shoots even scenes of banal upper-middle-class-ness with theatrical dread. The characters are spikey but also get some humanity to them. They are helpful to each other but they also make things a little worse at all times with the information they don’t share. Amanda and G.H. seem to take turns condescendingly telling each other that things are going to be fine or that something is totally normal when neither particularly believes it themselves. And throughout there is a sense that one of the most fraught elements of whatever is happening may be the miscalculations and conclusions jumped to by these reluctant housemates about each other, with both Amanda and Ruth just wanting the other’s family to leave already.
Also, Leave the World Behind is funny — bleakly, sorta meanly funny, but funny. I found myself laughing out loud frequently (and in that vein, it has a pretty great final note) and just sort of enjoying the way the movie frequently seems to be tickled with itself. A
Rated R for language, some sexual content, drug use and brief bloody images, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Sam Esmail (who also wrote the screenplay, based on the book of the same name by Rumaan Alam), Leave the World Behind is two hours and 18 minutes long and is streaming on Netflix.
May December (R)
An actress attempts to get into the head of a woman she’ll be portraying in a movie in May December, a well-acted disturbing drama from director Todd Haynes.
Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is a famous enough actress that people get wide-eyed when she passes by and will fan-out about her previous work. Her upcoming movie is a sort of indie production looking at a scandal from the 1990s involving Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who was then in her mid 30s. As Gracie tells it, she was married and working at a pet shop when she had a passionate affair with a coworker that led to the end of her marriage to her husband at the time with whom she had three children. Another way to describe that “affair” would be felony child sexual assault, as Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), the boy she was caught with, was 13 years old.
Gracie went to jail, where she gave birth to their first child, Honor (Piper Curda), now a college student. Gracie and Joe eventually married and also had twins, Mary (Elizabeth Yu) and Charlie (Gabriel Chung), who are, as the movie starts, days away from their high school graduation. Gracie and Joe, who is now in his mid 30s, live in Savannah, the town they’ve always lived in. So they have a support system of family and a small group of friends who buy Gracie’s home-produced baked goods but also Gracie occasionally receives boxes of poo in the mail.
Elizabeth shows up to kind of shadow Gracie — to convey the truth of Gracie and Gracie and Joe’s relationship, as she tells everyone. Gracie might have her reservations but also seems to like the idea that she’ll have some control over the revisiting of her infamy. Elizabeth learns to mimic Gracie’s mannerisms and sometimes intentionally lispy speech and also inserts herself into the family’s life in a way that is mildly to moderately destructive to this already deeply damaged group of people. Included in this emotional quicksand is Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), Gracie’s youngest child by her first marriage, who was a tween when the scandal came to light and seems to have been destroyed by it.
Actually, even Elizabeth, who shows up with an almost journalistic pose of wanting to “understand,” seems pretty messed up in how she basically just wallows in the griminess of Gracie and her choices. She might claim to want “the truth” but that seems to always translate to the most tabloid-y approach. Portman is commendably game at letting us see the actory nonsense of her character without trying to convince us that Elizabeth is, like, doing art. Likewise, Moore is very good about leaving it vague how much of Gracie’s awfulness is the result of unhealed damage from her own youth and how much is self-conscious predatory behavior masquerading in false innocence. It’s an impressively unflattering portrayal.
The standout performance, though, is from Melton, who gives us a Joe so firmly stuck in the trauma of what happened to him that he can’t see his way out or even be particularly useful in shielding his kids from their mother’s emotional abuse. Melton does a good job of giving us a person who seems thoroughly flattened — someone who is never not screaming on the inside but is almost immobilized on the outside. It is all deeply unpleasant to watch.
And there’s your May December poster quote: “very well acted, deeply unpleasant to watch!” The movie has moments of (very dark) dry humor but those don’t exactly lighten the “aftermath of a horrible car crash” vibes that follow you throughout. I don’t think you’ll be sorry having seen it, particularly if you are a follower of Oscar-y, year-end movie conversation, but I won’t pretend you’ll have a whole lot of fun sitting through it. What’s that, like a B+? For all the quality?
Rated R for some sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Todd Haynes with a screenplay by Samy Burch, May December is an hour and 57 minutes long and streaming on Netflix.
Featured photo: Leave the World Behind.
