In 2018, Sam Levinson, the son of Oscar-winning director of Rain Man and Good Morning Vietnam Barry Levinson, made a movie called Assassination Nation, about a town devolving into anarchy due to a hacking scandal. It received mixed reviews -praise directed at things such as its style and themes, but criticism where it concerned the writing and characters. That criticism it seems, really hit Levinson hard, as have the minor areas of backlash to his otherwise well-received HBO series Euphoria. And Malcolm & Marie, which he wrote and directed entirely in quarantine, is a rather transparent expression of his ego as it pertains to both his artistry and the critical response to it.
Shot in black and white, the film depicts a single evening at the home of a filmmaker Malcolm (John David Washington) and his girlfriend Marie (Zendaya) following his first major movie premiere. Celebration turns into interrogation and argument mostly relating to the movie, how it’s perceived, and how it is intertwined with their relationship, as the evening progresses in real time. It’s a tested formula, but one that has proven successful multiple times, and is especially economic given the circumstances Malcolm & Marie was made in. It’s also the perfect vessel for an elaborate spewing of thoughts and feelings otherwise difficult to express traditionally through the medium. Levinson takes full advantage of this, and the result is an extremely self-indulgent mess.
It’s a nice-looking self-indulgent mess, I’ll give it that. For as opaquely ostentatious as his black and white photography is, emphasizing more starkly the comparison to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, it looks pretty clean. There is a certain visual rhythm the film maintains that is quite attractive: the long takes, the lighting choices -it’s not a poorly made project by any means. But the technical prowess on display can’t distract for long in a film so dependent on its’ script and characters, and they are the weight that pulls the entire ship down.
This is a truly awful script, and it’s most clear in the dialogue, which is full of awkward conversation, is excessively speech-heavy and structurally repetitive. Already, the bizarre “mac’n cheese” bit has become the films’ most transcendent joke, so specifically artificial it is in both concept and delivery. And yet Levinson is clearly so proud of his work here, especially in the metatextual connotations he might have thought would go over the viewers’ heads. If they were to do so though, the film would have no point -they are the movies’ reason for existing. Malcolm & Marie is a pure auteur film, a testament to Levinsons’ brilliance as it asserts his understanding of his craft over those who would say otherwise -folks like me for instance.
Time and time again, Malcolm mocks the way his film is perceived, positive though the reception generally is. Even if they like it, the critics miss the point or read far too much into it by his estimation. Those rants about critics are particularly embarrassing to watch and nakedly personal, ballooning into full-fledged monologues of poorly thought-out arguments about the purpose of making movies and gripes on contemporary film discourse -while using convenient stereotypes and lip-service to a real issue in criticism (the lack of high-profile POC critics for instance) as a shield against taking them seriously. Levinson is actively trying to be a step ahead of his critics on this film, calling out what he anticipates they’ll read into it, and attempting to make himself look smarter than them by refuting it. However try as he might, he can’t hide how visibly pathetic and insecure that is (he’s not the first of course; both M. Night Shyamalan and Alejandro G. Iñárritu have painted their critics in similarly broad caricatures); nor can he see how much it stands in the way of the movie actually being a movie on its’ own terms.
Hand in hand with this outrage and in an unbelievable demonstration of poor judgement, is a clumsy commentary on the white reception to black art. Malcolm finds it tedious and disingenuous that his movie, which is about a young womans’ journey through addiction, is being read as a social commentary on systemic racism when to his mind it’s just a story. Unable to understand that meaning is attributed to art through the social, political, and cultural contexts of the time it was made in, he seeks to remove any racial connotations his film may have, stopping just short of asking ‘why does everything have to political’ or declaring he ‘doesn’t see colour’ –almost as though it’s not really a black man saying this. The conversation on the intersection between race and politics in artistry and the seeming obligation of black artists to make statements out of their films is an important one to be had (and one that One Night in Miami touches on much better), but not from a white director using a black mouthpiece for legitimacy and doing so with obnoxious exasperation. The way Malcolm and Marie ridicule theoretical white moviegoers while making out (one of a few gauche sexual scenes in the movie), it’s as though they’re making fun of the black issues as much as white guilt.
But the movie isn’t just about Levinsons’ issues with the movie industry and media surrounding it; the relationship drama does take up a large chunk of the runtime as we learn that Marie was the inspiration for the lead character of Malcolms’ film, much as he denies it, and it’s the source of some considerable strife for their relationship. And there’s an unavoidable irony in the fact that Levinsons’ made a film where a director refuses to acknowledge his movie is an uncomfortable imitation of someone’s life, while seeming to lack the awareness that Malcolm & Marie is likewise an exposé of his own self-image as a filmmaker …and perhaps more. Malcolm and Maries’ fights are very intense and venomous, in the tradition of the best couples’ quarrels in cinema, from Marriage Story all the way back to the aforementioned Virginia Woolf. Through it all, the film routinely doubles back in suggestion of an underlying romance, but all it really communicates is how toxic the relationship is, and especially for Marie how swiftly she needs to leave it. Malcolm is far more insidious and emotionally abusive towards her –one of the films’ few really good scenes sees him laying into her through a harsh story meant to enforce her insignificance while she just lies in a tub taking it with stone-faced misery. And yet we’re meant to accept their relationship is good and meaningful and deserves to remain intact through this and heftier verbal transgressions. Washington and Zendaya are good, but they are helpless to make any of it look genuinely romantic.
A curious note: Levinson seems to be obsessed with Barry Jenkins, name-dropping him more than any other figure in his catalogue of reference points that also includes Spike Lee, John Singleton, and William Wyler of all people. But Jenkins is a hilariously frequent focus of his attention –at one point Malcolm makes the bizarre assertion that Moonlight was so good because Jenkins is not gay. That’s when it clicks that the Jenkins references are a lampshade, and a way to sidestep predicted criticism about Levinson being a white director daring to make a movie about a black filmmaker. Barry Jenkins made a movie about a gay person so Sam Levinson is justified in making a movie about a black person. But Moonlight was about gay identity and black identity in tandem, and Jenkins is black (also Tarell Alvin McCraney, a gay black man, wrote the damn story!). Levinson is a white guy who chose to make a movie about a black couple, who chose to make the intentions and interpretations of black art a major discussion point, and who chose to use race as a screen for his targeted ire. It shouldn’t be a surprise that it backfired.
And for all of this Malcolm & Marie is a fascinating failure, perhaps too revelatory -but then maybe necessarily so. What other entitled, egotistical white filmmakers have a movie like this in their back pocket? There’s a beauty too through all the bewilderment that speaks to potential squandered. It should not be discounted that Sam Levinson has real talents as a director, but he really should not be writing his own movies.
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