Since time immemorial, American mass culture has told us to condemn conspicuous consumption, wretched excess, and braggadocious behavior in general. Yes, we are hypocritical about it: The Left lionizes Kennedys and Jobses and other American aristos in their alliance. The nonwoke among us look up to Elon Musk. And most of us watch, when everyone else has left the room, assorted Kardashians.
Even so, the social prejudice against those who are perceived as having too much money, possessions, and tax attorneys remains. From time to time, this bias asserts itself in half-baked social movements (remember Occupy Wall Street?) or ginned-up outrage over corporate scandals (remember Enron?). We again find ourselves in such a moment.
The antagonism to wealth is all around us. It’s in the weird normalization of debt forgiveness, about which suddenly we are not supposed to think “systematically” at all. It’s in the unhealthy obsession with the tax returns of Donald Trump. And this month, it’s on movie screens everywhere, especially in the new movie Triangle of Sadness.
In it, Swedish filmmaker Ruben Ostlund dreams up what must seem to him the most unappealing group of characters imaginable, including a pouty male model and his equally sulky girlfriend, also a model, plus a Russian agricultural magnate who scoffs at socialism, and genteel British marrieds whose wealth springs from the manufacturing of hand grenades — to make the world safe for democracy, they assure us. Having assembled these and other similar affluent characters on a $250 million luxury yacht, Ostlund proceeds to ask them to behave as obnoxiously as possible, kills off most of them when the vessel is fired upon by pirates, and finally maroons the survivors on a seemingly uninhabited island where they are ruled by a former yacht crew member, once put-upon and now flush with power.
For imagining the unhappy ends met by an assortment of rich people meant to be unlikable, Ostlund was honored with the highest prize in international filmdom, the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. No one could deny that Ostlund has an enviable command of cinematic technique — like the equally proficient (and unlikable) Michael Haneke, his camera lingers with great authority on his subjects — but he has put them to use to profoundly uncinematic ends.
Here’s how: To make an argument against the wastefulness or wantonness of the wealthy is a perfectly legitimate intellectual exercise, but it is antithetical to motion pictures, which depend on audience involvement. In other words, if we watch people on a movie screen, even one whose job is as silly as a male model, we tend to become involved in them and their affairs. They must be utterly monstrous or transparently evil to escape our sympathy altogether, and none of Ostlund’s are. His ship consists merely of fools, and we cannot help, moment to moment, but feel for the fools. As Jean Renoir said, everyone has his reasons.
As a satirist, Ostlund toggles between not going far enough and going much, much too far. Early in the film, he tends to fall back on what he takes to be the inherent silliness or awfulness of a person rather than push his behavior into humorous extremes. In one scene, the models — Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean, who died unexpectedly in August at age 32) — have an interminable argument over which of them should settle a restaurant bill. Ostlund takes it as a given that we will find their quarrel the very definition of trivial. Yet we don’t hate either character enough to sit in judgment of them. As played by two attractive, not unlikable actors, Carl seems like a dumb but decent bloke, and Yaya is perfectly lovely. So what if they are on Instagram too much? By the same token, the Russian bigwig, Dimitry (Zlatko Buric), is meant to be a buffoon, maybe even a bit of a tyrant. But with his ready smile, shock of wild white hair, and gales of laughter, he comes across as no worse than an oaf. That the passengers feast on jar after jar of Nutella is not sufficient to inspire class warfare.
On the other hand, the first names of the British munitions makers attest to Ostlund’s stridency: That Winston and Clementine (Oliver Ford Davies and Amanda Walker) are named for a certain British prime minister and his spouse is meant to kindle an instinctive anti-imperialist reaction within the audience — aha! the children of empire make hand grenades! — but it’s so obvious and so dumb that it falls flat. The endless sequences in which the crew is shown bending over backward to cater to the needs of the guests are meant to provoke a similar sort of rage, but one feels tempted to tell Ostlund: There is no practical way to run a yacht without people to scrub the decks, serve the food, and keep calm and carry on. For better or for worse, this is the way the world works.
The film itself enters rough waters when, midway through, the yacht becomes a cauldron of seasickness. Here, in one of the grossest passages since the heyday of Peter Greenaway, Ostlund stacks the deck unforgivably: The only people who wretch are the high-flying guests, including, most uncharitably, Dimitry’s wife (Sunnyi Melles), who slides around in spit-up while clutching a commode. Is the crew so noble they are immune to stormy seas? Expelling a different sort of bile is the Captain, who, as played by Woody Harrelson, is enjoyably dissipated and plain-spoken. Served a hamburger and french fries when the others are feasting on octopus and sea urchin, he says, “I’m not a fan of fine dining.” But he eventually becomes a tiresome expositor of Marxism: literally, Marxism. At least Harrelson is amusing when he says, trying to drunkenly pronounce “socialist,” “I’m a sh*t showlist.”
After the pirate attack sinks the yacht, a random assortment of passengers and crew members set up camp on an island, where they spend less time trying to flag search parties and more time attempting to remake civilization. In this, they are led by Abigail (Dolly De Leon), the sunken yacht’s one-time “toilet manager” and now the queen of what is later described, with a straight face, as an attempt at matriarchy. Granting that De Leon makes a convincing despot, Abigail’s transformation into a petty tyrant does little more than prove that Lord of the Flies is available in Swedish translation.
Nearly 50 years ago, A Hard Day’s Night director Richard Lester made an altogether finer film about a doomed ship, the action-adventure classic Juggernaut, starring Omar Sharif and Richard Harris. In that film, the idle rich and the hard-working crew members were far apart, too, but they were drawn together by a common threat: a bomb-maker who had booby-trapped the vessel.
By contrast, Triangle of Sadness settles on a far less aspirational, far more boring view of the world: The rich are vile, the poor exploited (until they become exploiters themselves), and class differences unbridgeable. Overly long at nearly two and a half hours, the film assaults us with these ideas again and again with an increasingly over-the-top mixture of purported humor and filth, literal and metaphorical. In its boring anti-capitalism, this movie is as likely to last as that “We are the 99%” meme you might remember from the Obama administration. The crowds of gowned and tuxedoed jet-setters at Cannes in the south of France were accidentally right when, by giving it cinema’s highest award, they revealed that Triangle of Sadness registers no real threat to their status.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
