So Ruben Ostlund Made Another Adam McKay Movie...

     I'll put it in writing right here, right now: I do not like "The Square". It is a two and a half hour film with exactly 2 good sequences (Elisabeth Moss fighting over a condom and Terry Notary being an ape, to be precise) and otherwise filled with satire that is both very obvious and not especially funny. It won the Palme D'or. Surely that should have been that. But no, Ruben Östlund, the primary figure in Swedish cinema on the global stage at this moment in time, somehow snagged a second golden palm for... it would be pithy to call it the same thing, but it's darn close. 

 What we have here is a "high concept" but puddle deep satire of rich people. Ruben Östlund thinks that rich people are kind of lame. He thinks this generally, because nobody should have that much wealth, and he thinks specifically that rich people are fake woke hypocrites. These are the exact same things he thought in 2017 when he won his first top prize at Cannes. What we have lost in a few scenes of specific satire targeted at the insular world of art, we replace with literally one single solitary scene targeted at the insular world of male modeling. Otherwise, "Triangle of Sadness" is (stop me if you've heard this one before) a very long comedy that is mildly but not superlatively funny and which doesn't have an awful lot to say about the world besides the fact that the global ultra rich are just, like, lame people. In fewer words, it's an Adam McKay joint.

 The movie is not bad in the way that some AI-generated blockbusters are bad. Its plotting is inspired; its performances are strong; it's sometimes quite funny; it's about something. If that is your bar for a good movie, and your local AMC only plays a handful of those per year, then you'll probably like "Triangle of Sadness" just fine. But at some point in the film's third act, I had to ask myself who exactly this is for. If you're an American and also the type of person to seek out the film because you're familiar with its Swedish auteur, or because it won a prominent French film festival award, I think it's fair to assume that you probably already hold left wing views. If that's true, then what exactly is the value added of a "satire" that tells you things you already know, in a very obvious manner, with maybe enough laughs to sustain 1.5 hours but certainly not enough to hold fort for 2.5? "Vice" and "Don't Look Up" are the only recent comparisons I can think of - movies that in theory are super ambitious, but on the screen are just mildly funny diversions meant to tell the audience things that the audience already believes. None of McKay's films, and none of Östlund's, made me think about the world in a different way. If you fundamentally disagree with the premise here, if you think Östlund's old British couple who manufacture hand grenades are cool people who deserve their riches for making an in-demand product... you're never going to spend 150 minutes of your life watching a Swedish art film whose main selling point is winning a festival award? The most generous selling point "Triangle" has in the states is A- list star Woody Harrelson, a politically-incoherent-ostensibly-leftist celebrity, playing, well, a politically incoherent ostensibly leftist yacht captain, for maybe half an hour of screen time. How much of this is Östlund's fault, I don't know, perhaps that's a fair question. But it's what I focused on in my screening, populated with older people who mostly enjoyed the gross-out sequences and younger hipster types who didn't seem to find it very funny.

 This is a film stacked with so many obvious flaws (Östlund always goes for the cheapest possible joke when targeting millennial influencers, the dynamics of a lower class janitor taking power in the third act are never meaningfully explored) that people might be tempted to overlook the main flaw: it has "correct" ideas but without an interesting or unique way of expressing them. The script never really gives you a reason to dislike the people who end up on its luxury yacht, except for the assumption that you yourself are bringing a dislike of the kind of people who would end up on a luxury yacht. The wide but not deep approach to characters results in a main couple that both read as blank personality voids and a group of yacht passengers that will (somehow, literally) read Ronald Reagan quotes off of cell phones to prove how capitalist they are to the audience. Again, virtually all of these complaints boil down to "I wish Östlund did X in the writing process", and not "this is bad filmmaking", but I am very much not a fan of "Triangle of Sadness". It's a shallow film about shallow people, because making a deeper film (or even an equally mediocre film about deeper people) would have been much harder.