Written/Directed By: Lukas Moodysson
Starring: Gael García Bernal as Leo, Michelle Williams as Ellen, Marife Necesito as Gloria
Lukas Moodysson is one of the few Swedish directors, alongside Tomas Alfredson and some other people I can’t quite remember (lolz), that has a substantial presence in contemporary ‘world cinema’ (a term that I hate for its reductionistic tendencies and American bias but that is, unfortunately, inescapable); and I make the most of every opportunity to extol the beauty of Swedish cinema. He is also the main creative force behind the best lesbian romance film in history, the gorgeously understated Fucking Amal, and has on multiple occasions been dubbed “the new Bergman” — because American film critics’ only knowledge of great Swedish films is from their essential viewing of Bergman’s overrated classic The Seventh Seal and they have no idea who Victor Sjöström or Bo Widerberg is, and because Moodysson really is one of most interesting filmmakers Sweden has ever had to offer. Naturally, the thought of praising his work while decrying the vapidity and sheer triteness of American/mainstream cinema is incredibly tempting. However, Moodysson’s Mammoth is too much of a blithering disappointment to allow that.
For one, the soundtrack is a giant fucking annoyance. Some of the tracks here are appealingly hipster-chic, but like most other directors who aren’t Sofia Coppola and have cool music taste but a poor understanding of mood, they often feel tragically inapposite and/or painfully uncomfortable. For example, when Leo finally succumbs to fucking around with a prostitute, the post-coital scene is accompanied by a bizarrely moving electronic instrumental piece, which seems to indicate that we should appreciate the romance in it, but then the sequence continues with Leo secretly, inconsiderately leaving her while she’s asleep. I understand what Moodysson is trying to do — he wants to emphasize that the romance was just an escapist fantasy, an illusion of intimacy, but he doesn’t succeed because he doesn’t understand how soundtracks work. Non-diegetic music either tells the audience how to react, or hints at a hidden emotional state. The problem is, Leo doesn’t secretly feel that his encounter is romantic — he loves his family too much to make it out to be anything more than a temporary, regrettable but necessary behavioral anomaly in an alien world, and while Leo understandably wants it to be romantic, the film and the audience are supposed to remain ambivalent, because they, as presumably intelligent entities, must acknowledge both the essentialness and wrongness of his dalliance; they can’t and don’t have Leo’s privilege of living inside the fantasy. If the music were diegetic, it would’ve both emphasized the illusory nature of Leo’s affair while effectively disengaging the audience from the romance; if there were no music, the film would allow us the space necessary to ponder the morality and reasons for Leo’s actions. Instead, Moodysson smothers us with an inappropriately romantic song choice, emptying the scene of its depth and unconvincingly invites us to revel in its aimlessness. When Leo finally returns to his family, Cat Power’s poignant “The Greatest” plays in the background (great music taste btw lolz), and there is absolutely no attempt at addressing Leo’s lack of guilt over fucking a prostitute while being away from his wife. These haphazard, bewildering uses of music (there are so many other instances, but I don’t have the effort to list them all) also parallel the tragic self-unawareness of the screenplay, which is a point I’ll revisit later on.
In the second half of the movie, home to much of the film’s overwrought drama, there are also just too many scenes where dramatic instrumental pieces manipulatively bend us over backwards to fuck the sympathy out of us. For example, when the (sadistic) grandmother brings Salvador to a junkyard where poor children are collecting trash, sad piano music plays in the background because Moodysson too wants us to feel guilty over the fact that some children have shit lives. I mean, it’s really sad that people have to live that way, but what’s even sadder is that Moodysson thinks that this is some kind of powerful revelation deserving of a lot of screentime. Part of what makes Slumdog Millionaire so wonderful is its no-nonsense depiction of Indian slums; it shows us how disgusting the living conditions are, how unsafe and horrible that world is, but the insight is always just a sidenote. The movie, above all, is a story of triumph, of destiny and love, not of how sad the world is and how bad we should feel for owning iPhones while others don’t. The world is fucking unfair, and obviously sometimes it’s really sad. But get the fuck over it. How naive can you be? This naivete brings me to my next point: White guilt.
I think this film, above all, is an unwitting (but illuminating) insight into the dynamics of white guilt. Leo travels to Bangkok, and feels overly guilty about a pretty Thai girl being a prostitute, so he hands her a shitton of money and asks her to go home to ‘sleep’, possibly because he is stupid enough to think that his money will last her a lifetime and will effectively turn her away from lucrative nights of prostitution, but probably because he is actually condescending and self-important enough to think that he alone can change the way things are in the third world. This self-importance is suggested throughout the movie when he tells the Thai whore that she SHOULDN’T EVER THINK THAT BOYS ARE GOOD WHILE GIRLS ARE NOT and when he arbitrarily declares, in laughable sincerity, that he should think about DOING CHARITY in less fortunate places, especially since he has SO much time to spare for some occasional self-serving pseudo-goodwill. Even Ellen, his wife, immediately feels bad for unintentionally discrediting the merits of Tagalog (Philippines’ national language) and spends much of the second half of the movie attempting to make herself feel better by showing her maid, Gloria, some cheap parlour tricks involving an apple pretending to be an orange. When I first saw these scenes, I immediately thought that Moodysson was cleverly, self-knowingly pointing out the laughability of white guilt. But then I realized that he was juxtaposing them with some disgusting, cringe-inducing scenes involving Gloria’s children and their oh-so-sad lives; turns out, Moodysson, in true white ignorance, doesn’t even recognize how self-important and disgusting these sympathy ploys are. Yes, people in the USA are generally quite privileged, and yes, the people in third world nations (specifically Thailand and the Philippines here) aren’t as entitled, but so fucking what? Is Moodysson so ignorant that he doesn’t realize that there are too ghettos in the US? Does he not realize that there are too privileged people in third world nations? The Bangkok that Leo first sees looks exactly like a high-budget Hollywood set, yet Moodysson seems perfectly and tragically unaware of the implications here — because he too is an unwitting advocate of self-important white guilt and first-world condescension. Think about that. Moodysson’s underlying sentiments are truly disgusting.
The worst part of the film is the Gloria character. She is such a flat, nonsensical caricature of working mothers and maids across the globe it is almost painful and infinitely insulting. We are led to believe that Leo and Ellen’s daughter, Jackie, is a stand-in for Gloria’s sons, but Gloria seems genuinely delighted by Jackie. Gloria cries dramatically (and haphazardly) practically every night when she talks to her children, and constantly talks about her inability to be away from her children (something that has understandably been interpreted as an anti-feminist statement against working mothers), but this pain is never transferred into her job, where she magically puts her pain away and savors her time with Jackie, even praising her intelligence in front of her Filipino friends and teaching her Tagalog words. This incongruity is endlessly baffling and unconvincing. Necesito doesn’t seem to understand her character’s pain, but then again perhaps it’s Moodysson’s fault for not telling her? Her character immediately reminds me of Walter Salles’ segment in the anthology film Paris, Je Taime, in which a maid too is made to take care of her employer’s child while abandoning her own — except that film effortlessly conveyed her plight, while Mammoth remains as inarticulate as Gloria is ridiculous. Also, just to add on to Moodysson’s inherent racism, the Filipino character in his film is a maid, and the Thai character in his film is a prostitute. Right on, white people. Asians so enjoy being reduced to cultural stereotypes by the ever-wonderful white gaze. BRB, STABBING MYSELF.
This film bravely attempts to style itself as a piece of world film, but fails quite miserably. While most films tend to be in one language or at most two, Mammoth ambitiously sends its characters to 3 different parts of the globe and incorporates all 3 languages into its framework. I mean, it unwisely perpetuates the myth of difference between the three peoples, but at least there is some vague attempt to highlight the universality of disconnectedness, especially in the first half of the movie. Ellen and Leo, Gloria and her sons are both separated by distance, Ellen and Jackie by Gloria and by Ellen’s job, Leo and the Thai whore by language, Leo and Bob by lifestyle. However, instead of intelligently tackling this idea of disconnectedness and disillusionment and linking it to modernity, Moodysson bizarrely uses it to make a vapid statement about privilege, which in turn completely undermines his attempts at universality. The titular mammoth ivory pen at first too seems to be a metaphor of disconnection, in that the ivory is at once tangible and intangible, physical but of unimaginable, non-existent provenance, but it turns out to be a lame statement about Leo’s privileged life, a trite declaration of first-world/third-world imbalance.
But good filmmakers have a tendency of fitting in at least a few redeeming qualities in even their worst movies. I really enjoyed the disconnectedness in the first half of the film, and had the film been about disconnectedness in a modern world, regardless of race or country, I would have enjoyed it a lot more. Of course, Moodysson’s racism would’ve remained as pervasive, but still. Also, in Moodysson’s defence, the film does have a marvelous premise — it is just executed in such a ghastly, unintelligent fashion that it is indefensibly offensive. Anyway. The two leads’ performances are absolutely spectacular. I’m a huge fan of Gael García Bernal, an ex-teen idol from Mexico turned critical darling with Alfonso Cuáron’s fantastic Y Tu Mamá También turned perennial supporting actor in an assemblage of Oscar-nominated films, and here he is absolutely spot-on in playing the awkward, guilt-ridden Leo, who is dreamily attractive but subtly awkward, child-like but tentatively assertive. It’s a gloriously strange, believable character that for once humanizes the Hot Male Lead, and it’s really, really sad that Bernal’s magnificent creation will be ignored because of Moodysson’s sub-par efforts. Michelle Williams, probably the most exciting actress today, is as always, unstoppably eclipsing and achingly humane. There is nothing she can’t do, except save this film (lolz).
KevinScale Rating: 1.5/5
therein, Therin. 