Sam Levinson (2021)
It was no surprise but still an apt coincidence that two of 2020’s stronger films mostly confined their characters to the same indoor location. No surprise because Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and One Night in Miami were originally (and, on screen, still essentially are) stage plays. One of 2021’s earliest releases, Malcolm & Marie, is a different matter – a movie conceived and developed in the lockdown world. A two-hander, shot within or just outside a private home in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, Sam Levinson’s film ‘was the first Hollywood feature to be entirely written, financed, and produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, with filming taking place in secret in June and July 2020’ (Wikipedia). Malcolm & Marie may thereby have a place in cinema history but it’s an unsatisfying, in some respects troubling, piece of work.
Malcolm Elliott (John David Washington) is a film-maker. Marie Jones (Zendaya) is his girlfriend. They return to a rented Malibu beach house after the premiere of ‘Imani’, a movie that Malcolm has written and directed. When they first get in Malcolm’s on a high but not for long. Marie is hurt that, when he spoke at the premiere and thanked various people, she wasn’t included. What’s more, the title character in his film is a woman of colour and a self-harming drug addict; Marie, who also fits that description or did until she kicked her habit, accuses Malcolm of basing his protagonist on her. He refutes the charge at length, listing facets of the character inspired by his other previous girlfriends before claiming that Imani is modelled chiefly on himself. He then recites angrily, and even more wordily, Marie’s many faults. She doesn’t say much back. Once he’s shouted himself out, they reconcile. Until the next thing that gets Malcolm going.
That’s how Malcolm & Marie is structured. Although written directly for the screen, the script has stage-play features. Actors with lots to say and do in the theatre need a break every now and then. The couple’s short ceasefires supply that. (After he and Marie have made up the first time, Malcolm goes for a pee. Both characters regularly visit the bathroom – virtually the wings, except that the camera keeps them company there.) What’s more, the writer-director needs to organise his material to spin it out to feature length (106 minutes), cutting what in essence is a continuous set-to into slices – or slabs – of dialogue, which are usually Malcolm monologues. When he returns from his loo break Marie, who used to be an actress, asks why he didn’t cast her as Imani. He yells, ‘So that’s what all this is about!’ and goes off on one again. He may be right about what’s really eating Marie – it emerges she auditioned for the lead in Malcolm’s film – but you feel that Sam Levinson (Barry’s son) has delayed this wodge of discord not as a psychological insight but for his own practical purposes. Whatever, it makes for an awkward transition. It’s as if, while Malcolm was out of the room, Marie was working out how to wind him up next.
That said, Malcolm is easily enraged and Marie isn’t the sole irritant. She hears an alarming off-screen roar and stream of expletives and asks what’s wrong: turns out that Malcolm, anxious to look up the first reviews of his film, is having trouble with the beach house Wi-Fi. When he does manage to access a crit on his phone this triggers another lengthy paroxysm, at the end of which Marie quietly delivers one of Levinson’s few funny lines: ‘This is how you react to a good review?’ The notice, from the Los Angeles Times, is by a white female critic: Malcolm holds forth on how she doesn’t understand what he was trying to do in ‘Imani’. His tirade includes a couple of sharp comments about the inadvertently racist allowances that a liberal white woman critic might make for a Black male director (allowances she’d be unlikely to make for a white male director) – but the speech is worrying as the climax to a persistent element of the script.
Malcolm has a great deal to say throughout about films and film-makers. He’s annoyed that his work will be compared with that of Spike Lee and Barry Jenkins but not with the white Hollywood classics he reveres – The Best Years of Our Lives, Citizen Kane. The complaint is arrogantly preposterous: if, as it seems, ‘Imani’ is Malcolm’s first feature, it seems early in his career for him to be compared with anyone. And how many debutant white directors today get compared with William Wyler or Orson Welles? Sam Levinson seems to want to suggest the particular frustrations of a Black director but the absurdity of Malcolm’s expectations and the detail of the movie references make you wonder if he’s not a mouthpiece for Levinson himself. I’m not saying that, as a white writer-director, Levinson has no business attempting to speak for a Black one but nor am I convinced that he has honestly tried to do that in Malcolm & Marie – the assumed African-American perspective feels increasingly hollow. A different black-and-white issue concerns the cinematography (by Marcell Rév). In her largely negative review in Time, Stephanie Zacharek says, admiringly, that the film ‘looks fantastic, a black-and-white retro-mod reverie as cushiony as an Eames lounge chair’. That’s just the problem – Levinson’s monochrome is merely stylish, in contrast to the visuals in, say, Andrei Konchalovsky’s recent Dear Comrades!
Even allowing that the set-up makes it hard for the actor playing Malcolm not to be tiresome, Zendaya fares better than John David Washington, who is effortful from the start. When he and Marie return from the premiere Malcolm’s exuberance comes across not as natural euphoria but as Washington’s pumped-up, strenuously achieved high spirits. In comparison, Zendaya draws the camera effortlessly. Her more nuanced delivery is reinforced by a lissom physicality – although Malcolm’s repeated chatter about the male gaze has the effect of drawing attention to how much of the film Sam Levinson spends observing his actress in underwear. Like Zendaya, the score, by Labrinth, has a flexibility largely absent from the writing and direction, and from John David Washington’s acting.
At the height of the quarrel about not casting her as Imani, Marie emerges from the kitchen brandishing a big knife; Malcolm is terrified she’s going to stab herself or him. She keeps him in suspense – it’s her turn, at last, to dominate the conversation. Marie then suddenly switches to calmness: she was only pretending. ‘Why didn’t you do that in the audition?’ asks Malcolm. It sounds like another decent punchline except that his question gives the impression Malcolm knew all along that Marie was kidding – which is not the impression he gave for as long as she had the weapon in her hand. He should have known, though: I’d guess plenty of viewers will, as I did, assume throughout the scene that Marie is putting on an act. If this is what you assume, you may well, as I also did, find the knife pretence one of the film’s more convincing episodes. That says something about Malcolm & Marie.
7 February 2021
