It’s rare for a film to radically divide opinions like ‘Don’t Look Up‘, the political-apocalyptic satire written and directed by Adam McKay that ended the year 2021, succeeded to do. Fame preceded it in my mailbox and in the news stream on social media, and I found my friends’ opinions so radically divided as few movies (or other topics) managed to split them. My take joins those who liked the movie. ‘Don’t Look Up‘ seemed to me a quality comedy that tells a lot about the world we live in, about the quality of the world’s political class right now, and about the television that turns news into show business and show business into garbage, about the status of science and the denial of scientific evidence, about the mass addiction to celebrities and about the way big corporations control our lives, about the catastrophes that threaten humanity and the way we prepare to face or ignore them. The collection of celebrities participating in this production is impressive, but even more impressive is the fact that many of them play roles outside of their usual routines. If there were any doubts that Netflix is now in line with the big studios in the creation of interesting cinema, movies like ‘Don’t Look Up‘ should dissipate them without appeal.
Astronomy professor Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his PhD student (Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet heading straight to Earth, which seems to have 100% chances of destroying the world as we know it, in just over six months. As good citizens should do, the two notify the authorities and land quite quickly in the anteroom of the Oval Office. However, President Orlean (Meryl Streep) is too busy to receive them on the first day, and even the next day the news of the impending end of the world seems to her to be of little importance compared to the appointment of a judge to the Supreme Court or the approaching by-elections. Desperate, the two scientists will turn to television to make their message known to mankind, but the main effect is that the professor will become a celebrity and will bed the anchor of a news show (Cate Blanchett) while his student will woke up being arrested by the secret services and warned to stop spreading panic to the public. The government and military machines, the big corporations and the whole world will finally start acting, and by the time Earth will meet the comet, much more will have happened, stuff that would be ridiculous if it weren’t about our only planet.
Adam McKay is passionate about politics, big finance (‘The Big Short‘) and the mechanisms of the White House (‘Vice‘) but his career also includes scripts and directing of numerous segments in ‘Saturday Night Live’. The inspiration for the laught about the planet on the verge of destruction in ‘Don’t Look Up‘, I think, comes further back, from Kubrick‘s ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb‘ and Chaplin‘s ‘The Great Dictator‘. In fact, SNL and a number of other similar shows started there. A gallery of memorable acting performances helps. Leonardo DiCaprio adds another chameleon role to the repertoire. Jennifer Lawrence proves once again that beauty does not mean the denial of talent. Meryl Streep is a president descending directly from ‘Saturday Night Live’ whose character and (non-subtle) political allusions have the quality of upsetting everyone who wants to be upset. Cate Blanchett amazed me with another role in which it took me a long time on screen to recognize her. Ron Perlman plays a role that parodies all the other roles in his entire career. Ariana Grande almost plays herself, and sings very well. The number one acting creation, however, is, in my opinion, that of Mark Rylance in an anthological role of a big corporation tycoon that is far from everything he has done in the past. The only celebrities who get less consistent roles are Himesh Patel and Timothée Chalamet (when does this young man have time to star in so many movies?). The style of dialogue and filming is itself a satire and a parody of the ‘end of the world’ genre productions of the big studios. In my opinion, ‘Don’t Look Up‘ is one of the most entertaining but also significant films of this movie season. Many of today’s critics will regret later, I think, their opinions, because this is one of the films whose appreciation is likely to increase over time.