Kinds of Kindness

Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons

I enjoyed and appreciated Yorgos Lanthimos' Kinds of Kindness more than most did, or, I suspect, will. The tripartite Kinds of Kindness, which was written by Lanthimos and longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou, is a Lanthimos unvarnished by the lysergic palette and feminist empowerment of the Alasdair Gray adaptation, Poor Things, which won Emma Stone her second Oscar. Ms. Stone is back from that flick as are Willem Dafoe and Margaret Qualley. They are joined by Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, and Mamoudou Athie all taking multiple roles in the three stories in what will surely be one of the film ensembles of the year. Hunter Schafer's single scene marks her as a comer.

Lanthimos is too misanthropic for the mainstream or even a few critics who clutch notions of humanism to their chests as if they were prayer beads. Certainly some in the theater where I saw it seemed baffled by the mélange of carnage, cruelty, Janus-faced messiahs, and polymorphous perversity that Lanthimos and his cohorts present to us. For Lanthimos, mankind is simply part of earth's bestiary where creatures vie for dominance and inclusion. Lanthimos views this with a clinical detachment that rivals that of Kubrick. I don't view the two directors as cold, just determinedly objective. A significant amount of time is spent in hospitals and clinics in Kinds of Kindness. The film is a treatise on the care and feeding of humans. 

Lanthimos pictures a world where individuals are adrift. The traditional support systems in the West, family, church and rationality, have fallen by the wayside. People worship false idols or dream of being turned into a lobster. Whatever one thinks of his worldview, Lanthimos has carved out a distinctive vision in his work that is singular and unsparing. Kinds of Kindness is a minor key work, but contains as many memorable and uncanny moments, Plemons caressing the hair of a suspect, Stone peeling out in a purple Dodge Challenger, as his major films. It is a work of personal cinema in an industry dominated by juvenile escapism.