'Kinds of Kindness': Yorgos is Funny Even When He's Kind of Tedious
Yorgos Lanthimos dicks around with some of his favorite actors, which isn't the worst thing in the world.
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For those of us who follow movies, the normal impulse upon hearing that Yorgos Lanthimos has a new movie out (Kinds of Kindness, starring Emma Stone, Jesse P. Lemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Margaret Qualley) is to wonder, “What? When did he have time to write this?”
Poor Things (which was great) came out barely more than a year ago, after all.
Watching Kinds of Kindess unclouds the mystery rather quickly: it doesn’t seem to have involved that much writing. At least not the hard parts, where you try to give your disconnected whims a narrative throughline, shape story arcs, sweat over transitions, etc. Whatever script there was feels like it was more of a notebook.
Kinds of Kindness is sort of like the Lanthimos version of Spring Breakers, where an interesting director and his interesting actor pals sort of dick around and do sex jokes for a while. Spring Breakers if Harmony Korine was a Greek arthouse director, say. Yet where Spring Breakers was 94 minutes long (which was still probably a little too long for Spring Breakers, but it was on the right track), Kinds of Kindness clocks in at 164. While it stars exclusively actors we say we’d watch do anything, (Chau, Plemons, and Dafoe, especially) 164 minutes is too long for a movie consisting of three disconnected vignettes in which the main draw is crazy shit happening sort of at random every 15 or 20 minutes. Maintaining attention requires expectation, and Kinds of Kindness mostly only builds whimsy and the element of surprise.
The first vignette stars Jesse P. Lemons as a devoted employee to a controlling boss, played by Willem Dafoe. Dafoe’s character tells Lemons’ what to eat, how to dress, when to have sex with his wife (Hong Chau), and that he should try to gain some weight. That Lemons goes onto look progressively thinner in each successive vignette might be an inside joke, but probably not, given the presumably tight production schedule. The boss’s biggest ask yet is that Lemons crash his car into a stranger’s car, hard enough to potentially cause injury or death. Yorgos Stefanokos plays this stranger, a sleepy-eyed fat guy bald on top but with wild side hair who looks essentially like what you’d imagine if you closed your eyes and pictured “Greek man.” The Greek man’s name is RMF, who shows up as a sort of Macguffin in every vignette. Presumably there’s some thematic, symbolic connection between the three, but it feels like something the audience is left to project ourselves (a BYOT situation).
Lemons balks at the vehicular mayhem scheme, Dafoe fires him, and the rest of the vignette consists mostly of Lemons scheming ways to get rehired. Margaret Qualley plays Dafoe’s trophy wife/consort.
In the second vignette, Jesse P. Lemons plays a cop whose wife (Emma Stone) has disappeared somewhere in the wilderness, and when she gets back, he becomes convinced that she’s an impostor. Stone’s character says that where she went, the dogs were the humans and vice versa. He makes her cut off her pinky finger and eat it.
Finally, in the third vignette, Emma Stone, along with her bisexual friend played by Jesse P. Lemons, now wearing billowy pants and Teva sandals, is searching the world to find a guru with very specific qualities, to come work for a cult run by Willem Dafoe. Hong Chau plays Dafoe’s right-hand associate. Sometimes they put people in a sauna and then Hong Chau licks the sweat off of them to tell whether they’re contaminated. Margaret Qualley seems like she matches all of the guru qualities, so Emma Stone drugs her and measures her breasts to make sure.
If it sounds like weirdness for weirdness’s sake, a lot of it is, but Lanthimos has a flair for weirdness that doesn’t feel overly precious. More crucially, he has genuine comedic chops; an ability to slay with a laugh line or a sight gag you never see coming, going for actual gutbusters where most arthouse directors are content to just make you smile in your head a little. That Lanthimos never seems like he’s above toilet humor, titillation, or gore for shock value is part of why I like him.