Colossal
Nacho Vigalondo (2016)
Gloria (Anne Hathaway), an unemployed journalist with an alcohol problem, lives in the New York City apartment of her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens). He’s fed up with her heavy drinking and chucks her out. Gloria returns to her home town of Mainland, a fictional Middle America location, and moves into the conveniently available house she grew up in, which is empty of furniture, as well as people. She renews acquaintance with Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), a childhood friend who now owns and runs the local bar he inherited from his late father. Oscar offers Gloria a job there, which she accepts. He also sends round a truckload of furniture for her home. Unsurprisingly, the bar job doesn’t cure Gloria’s alcoholism: she joins Oscar and his friends, Garth (Tim Blake Nelson) and Joel (Austin Stowell), in after-hours drinking sessions. Each morning, she goes to a children’s playground to sleep off the effects of the night before. Meanwhile, in South Korea, a giant reptilian monster is terrorising the citizens of Seoul. The creature showed up there once before, twenty-five years ago, but it now starts appearing daily, at 8.05 pm local time. After a routine rampage, destroying people or buildings or both, the monster vanishes until the next evening. Gloria realises the giant lizard’s day trips to Seoul occur at exactly the same time that she enters the playground each morning. She confides in Oscar and his friends. Gloria and Oscar discover that, when he steps into the playground, a giant robot materialises in Seoul.
From an early point in their resumed friendship, Oscar seems to want and expect more from it than does Gloria, who is more attracted to Joel. Tensions between her and Oscar grow as he becomes possessive and demanding, and boil over, first when Gloria sleeps with Joel, then when Tim arrives in Mainland – supposedly on a business trip but in fact to reclaim his girlfriend. (As was suggested in their first scene together in the New York apartment, Tim, like Oscar, wants to be in control of her.) Oscar becomes physically violent towards Gloria in the playground; this triggers a showdown between the monster and the robot in Seoul. Gloria also now recalls in flashback an incident that occurred in the playground when she and Oscar were children (played by Hannah Cheramy and Nathan Ellison) – an incident which explains their ability to manifest their avatars on the other side of the world, and the South Korean debut of those avatars a quarter-century back. Rather than escape back to New York with Tim, Gloria takes a plane to Seoul, where she confronts the robot. In doing so, she causes her avatar to appear in the Mainland playground, where it deals conclusively with Oscar, which naturally gets rid of the robot too. Job done, Gloria goes into a bar in Seoul. She proposes to tell her incredible story to the girl behind the bar (Christine Lee) – and refuses the latter’s offer of a drink.
In his enthusiastic New Yorker review of Colossal, Richard Brody writes that:
‘Metaphors, if they’re any good, distill complexity not into simplicity but into clarity, bypassing the details of particular situations to find and represent their unifying universal traits and ideas. The story at the core of Colossal is one of a relationship that was monstrous in childhood and that, despite appearances, remains monstrous in adulthood. It’s a story of trauma—of a gender-centered trauma involving the physical force exerted by males (of any age) against females—and of that trauma’s enduring power in the life of a woman who hasn’t acknowledged it, faced it, and worked through it.’
Although the writer-director Nacho Vigalondo clearly is working out a (gargantuan) metaphor, there’s a lack of clarity – of critical consensus anyway – about what he’s metaphorising. Compared with Brody’s solemn sexual tyranny reading, Mark Kermode in the Observer, while acknowledging Oscar’s switch from quietly exasperated nice guy to vicious bully, summarises the set-up quite simply: ‘a young American woman’s drunken binges manifest themselves as a monstrous, lizard-like creature that terrorises South Korea’. And Edward Lawrenson in the Big Issue doesn’t mention metaphor at all: for him, Colossal is ‘a low-key, earnest character study of a young alcoholic’.
Reading these different interpretations afterwards was actually more entertaining than sitting through Vigalondo’s ‘genre mash-up’ (as several reviewers have gleefully described it). I hated the acting, a grating blend of competence and self-awareness that makes every emotion that’s expressed over-defined and terribly shallow, especially in the bits where Vigalondo means serious business. Perhaps this style of playing means that the more talented you are, the more annoying you are too. This is the obvious explanation for why I found Anne Hathaway’s zany-melancholy shtick especially hard to bear. But then, she does have by far the most screen time – and Dan Stevens is even worse than her in the opening exchange between Gloria and Tim, which certainly sets the tone for what follows.
When Gloria first sees Oscar again, he tells her about his father’s death. She replies that this must have been very upsetting for Oscar’s mother. Oscar reminds Gloria that his mother died long ago and that Gloria went to her funeral. Oscar may turn out the villain of the piece but this forgetfulness – which can’t be blamed on Gloria’s alcohol-induced amnesia of more recent times – is the most truly upsetting moment in the movie. Mark Kermode notes Nacho Vigalondo’s:
‘… satirical swipes … at the spectator culture of rolling news; when Gloria worries about “all those innocent victims” on the other side of the world, Oscar replies that it makes you realise “how lucky we are to be watching”. Elsewhere, it is pointedly observed that “if it only attacks Seoul, people will stop caring”.’
Edward Lawrenson makes a similar observation – ‘Perhaps Vigalondo is making some kind of comment about the attitude Hollywood monster movies have towards casualties in non-US cities’. There seems to be a fine line here between critiquing such an attitude and demonstrating it oneself. The fearful citizens of Seoul, as described by Vigalondo, are an undifferentiated foreign horde. They might as well be insects.
23 May 2017