THE LOBSTER (2016 US
Release)
Directed by Yorgos Lanithimos
A24, 119 minutes, R [Sexuality, language, animal
cruelty]
* * *
I often leave the cinema
without a completely formed opinion about the movie I've just seen. Sometimes a
provocative film needs 24-48 hours to marinate before I fully appreciate its
nuances and complexities. It’s rare, though, that more than a week later I’m
still not sure if I actually liked a
movie. You can toss The Lobster into
that sparsely populated tank. It might be brilliant. It might be rotted seafood
disguised in a visually appealing casserole. I suspect it’s actually just a
middling film—hence my rating—but I could be talked into a higher or lower rating.
The only thing of which I am 100% certain is that if you are the sort of person
who gets deeply disturbed by cruelty to animals and images thereof, you should
give The Lobster a wide berth.
This film stars Colin
Farrell as you’ve never seen him before: pot-bellied, laconic, and passive. It
is set in a future dystopia. Or is it a perverse nuclear family utopia? Society
requires adults to live as couples, with the added proviso that the couples
must have aligning characteristics. John C. Reilly, for instance plays the role
of Lisping Man (no one except Farrell has a name) and must find a soul-mate who
shares that impediment. What about those without partners? That’s the dystopian
angle and the dilemma facing David (Farrell). He is unexpectedly single because
his wife left him for another man. By law, single people must check into a
sanitarium-like facility, where they have 45 days to find a new partner or they
are surgically transformed into an animal of their choice. David arrives with a
dog in tow that is actually his brother Roger. Should David fail to find a near-sighted
person such as himself, we will become a lobster!
Okay, that’s deliciously
weird and surreal, as are some of the rituals of the hotel. Residents must sit
through insipid skits purporting to show the virtues of couples and the dangers
of being alone that, I suspect, are intended as barbed commentary on the
banality of the Religious Right. Even weirder, the facility forbids
masturbation, but requires males to be sexually stimulated by a maid, but not
to orgasm. The place is crawling with desperate people like Limping Man (Ben
Wishaw) and Nose-Bleed Woman (Jessica Barden). David finds himself stalked by
the frumpy Biscuit Woman (Ashley Jensen), but he’s so hollowed out from being cuckolded
that he gravitates toward Heartless Woman (Angelika Papoulia).
The film never fully
explains how society came to be this way or who is in charge, but, as
convention dictates, an authoritarian state begets an underground resistance
movement. In this case, it is the Loners, a loose band living in the woods that
swings entirely the other direction by demanding solitude, and forbidding any
sort of intimacy or coupling. Léa Seydoux is the Loner Leader—a droll oxymoron—and
she plays the part with icy intensity and a detached willingness to impose
barbaric penalties for those who break the band's code. David escapes to join
the Loners, but how will he respond when he meets Short-Sighted Woman (Rachel Weisz)? The
film ends on a Lovecraft-like note that is terrifying in its ambiguity.
Sounds intriguing, yes? And
so it is, though whether this is a great film is less certain. This is the
first English-language project for Greek director Yorgos Lanithimos, who has
done a decent job, though I constantly wondered what Joel and Ethan Coen would
have done with the same material. (I also thought of Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose Delicatessen is a spiritual cousin.) The Lobster is an Irish, English, Greek,
French, Dutch joint venture–ironic in that some of my reservations lay with the
manner in which the film flirts with several moods/genres without being fully
any of them: black comedy, surrealism, social commentary, romance, tragedy. I
admired its ambitiousness, its ambiguities, and its artistry, but I remain
uncertain as to whether it’s a brilliant pastiche or a failed synthesis. I
highly suspect the latter but, like I said, I could be persuaded otherwise.
Rob Weir
Postscript: The British
Academy honored Olivia Coleman with a Best Supporting Actress prize for her
role as the sanitarium manager. This is puzzling, as her role was relatively
minor and Seydoux, Papoulia, and Jensen are each more deserving.
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