Film Review: Malcolm & Marie
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Malcolm & Marie is sparse on setting, lighting, and cast members. The thing that it is not sparse on is anger and noise, making this film one of the most exhausting movies I have seen. This is a story about the souring relationship between a filmmaker and his girlfriend after the premiere of his new movie. It’s a simple premise that becomes fraught with extreme tension as the two characters take aim at their counterparts’ sorest spots and wound themselves in the process.
There is no way to escape the titanic shadow of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf when trying to make a film about a sour domestic situation. The problem many projects emulating that one have is two-fold: they aren’t written by a Pulitzer Prize winning author/directed by an EGOT winner and they mistake the nastiness of it’s words for why its successful. Yes, we enjoy getting to witness two people be awful, but if it doesn’t come from a truly emotional place or have someone other than the main couple to bounce off, it just feels awful. It should not be about how loud the actors get, but more the modulation of emotion, which makes the words feel impactful.
Writer/director Sam Levinson seems to have forgotten that when he was writing the script to Malcolm & Marie. This a movie where characters say several things to each other that should have either ended in break ups or murders, but yet somehow they find peace and do it all over again in 15 minutes. This repetition of simple statements that ramp up into world shattering declarations that go back to some semblance of being nice isn’t thrilling to watch, it’s tiring. At one point I paused the movie, thinking it was nearing the end, only to realize there was over an hour left.
These arguments probably feel so rote because it does not feel like there is anything of worth to say. Levinson seems more concerned with getting his feelings about art, critics, and filmmaking out that grounding these in some sort of character. It’s tough because there seems to be an artist grappling with interesting topics but I can’t help but feel a lack of sincerity. Taking aim at movie critics is fine, but Malcolm & Marie feels like a movie set to talk about an experience the writer can’t align with. It might be fine to have a upper class Black man rant about how critics approach Black art and go on about the male gaze and mention all these directors in an argument with himself, but it doesn’t feel genuine to the experience of a Black filmmaker in Hollywood who struggled to get his first movie off the ground. Honestly, if it weren’t for a well placed nigga and mentioning Spike Lee/Barry Jenkins every time he needed to bring up a Black filmmaker, you wouldn’t even know the character was Black. This makes the movie feel like Levinson is using a Black man as a shield to bring across his ideas and his recollection of his former relationship. We all might have universal experiences, but you can’t divorce the differences in experience from the characters.
This trickles down to the performances of Zendaya and John David Washington. Both of them have moments of real intrigue, but both are prone to going loud when intensity is called for, and there’s nothing in the story or script to reel them back in. Both try, they really do fight, to make something of the words but Malcolm & Marie just cannot get out of its own way to do anything more than be a drag.
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