Director Darren Aronofosky once commented in an interview while on the press circuit for “Black Swan” that the type of acting Natalie Portman was doing in that movie was the kind of acting that actors like doing. (See it and you can see why he was being a little defensive.) Actors want to perform scenes of heightened. The movie crew's job is to facilitate the same. Scenes of heightened emotion may not be easy, but easy is not the point. Ambition requires that the task be hard. Christian Bale doesn’t need to transform his body to play any particular role. Makeup and fats suits do exist. Christian Bale wants to do it.
I can only imagine that this sort of ambition draws actors to the projects of Director Yorgos Lanthimos and Writer Efthimis Fillippou, a pair of auteurs that deal primarily with the bizarre recesses of human behavior. Emma Stone is a seasoned veteran now having starred in several movies. Willem Dafoe returns with her from the latest Lanthimos movie, Poor Things, which was about a recently deceased woman who has her brain removed and replaced with the brain of her unborn child by a mad scientist. Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Mamoudou Athie, and Hong Chau are all rookies. Jesse Plemons, in particular, is an actor that specializes in being the square white guy in the room. He is flexing muscles here that he doesn’t usually get to flex. Like many Lanthimos projects, Kinds of Kindness is an exercise in stunt acting.
There is a fine line here when it comes to placing strange characters in bizarre situations and watching how they react. If the characters are too strange and the situations too bizarre, then the drama fails because there is no empathetic connection. There needs to be something that the audience can latch onto in order to feel what the characters are feeling.
“Kinds of Kindness” is a three-hour movie composed of three separate stories, one hour each. The actors are the same for all three movies, but they play different characters in each of them. Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone are the main characters. The titles of the stories refer to the only character that finds itself in all three movies, a man by the initials of R.M.F. And here you will have a good test of the movie reviewer. If the reviewer claims to understand why R.M.F. is important or what he can mean, then they might just be pretentious windbags. R.M.F., if he is anything, is an inside joke. The stories, for all intents and purposes, are in fact separate stories. They just employ the same actors.
The stories, like Lanthimos' career, are hit and miss. The first hews the closest to reality and thus works the best. The second works until its last fifteen minutes when it gets cold feet and breaks point of view. The third straight-up employs miracles, which have the strange effect of legitimizing what is otherwise utterly bizarre behavior. We will take them one at a time.
The first stars Jesse Plemons in an interesting turn. His character works for Willem Dafoe, but not in any worldly employment. Willem Dafoe orders him and Plemons complies in doing things so specific and disturbing that one would naturally suppose that Plemons is being blackmailed. But, apparently, Plemons isn't being blackmailed. Instead, he is just so needy and pathetic that he can't function without someone telling him what to do. In fact, this neediness is so absolute that by the end of the story, you may start wondering whether it is Willem Dafoe that has the short end of the stick. And since the movie employs no magic, adheres to its internal logic, and is well acted by consummate professionals, it is inherently interesting to watch.
The second story is strong until it commits a perplexing error. It too stars Jesse Plemons as a police officer whose wife, Emma Stone, survived a plane crash and several weeks on a deserted island before being rescued and returned home. The thing is, for whatever reason, Jesse Plemons isn’t sure that the Emma Stone who returned is the same woman who left. He thinks that maybe she is an imposter, perhaps an alien. So, either he is insane or she is an imposter. Because this is a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, both could be a possibility and for most of this story, it is fun trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, about three quarters of the way through, the movie switches its point of view from Jesse Plemons to Emma Stone and gives away the game. Like a movie trick that is explained, it loses its luster. Its feels like Yorgos may have gotten cold feet.
The third story stars Emma Stone as a woman who has abandoned her family to work for a religious cult. The cult is obsessed with purity, but not in any scientific way. As an example, to cleanse their sinners, they subject to them to hours in a sauna. Then they lick their sweat to test, based on the taste I guess, whether the purification rite worked. The catch is that this cult is on the search for a great healer of a certain gender, height, and weight, who can cure people just by touching them. This person ends up existing. And if she exists, well maybe you can test whether someone is pure by licking their sweat. As far as I can tell, the cult's plan is to find, kidnap, and imprison this healer on a boat and then, (maybe), sell tickets to visiting sick people. This story does end in a rather satisfying way, whereupon Emma Stone does a cool dance and nothing that took place before matters. Then R.M.F eats a sandwich, which also doesn’t mean anything.
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