'Don't Look Up' manages to feel life-affirming

Kirk Boxleitner | Jan 06, 20220

Courtesy photo count

Jonah Hill, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence spar over how, and even whether, to avert the end of the world in "Don't Look Up" on Netflix.

I've seen a few folks review writer-director-producer Adam McKay's "Don't Look Up" under the assumption it was intended as a response to COVID-19, even though enough of its pre-production was finished COVID and its principal photography was originally slated to start in April 2020.

More than a dozen years ago, I was rewatching an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" with one of my housemates at the time, in which Picard was captured and tortured by alien interrogators (Trek fans will recognize this as "Chain of Command, Part II").

My friend dismissed the episode as a well-made but heavy-handed response to President George W. Bush's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, except that the "Chain of Command" two-parter originally aired in December 1992, shortly after President George H.W. Bush lost his re-election bid to Bill Clinton.

The reason I bring this up is when I see critics taking McKay's "Don't Look Up" to task for how they've interpreted the politics of its soapboxing, I feel they're telling us less about the film than they are about themselves.

To be fair, especially after McKay followed up 2015's masterful "The Big Short" with 2018's well-intended misfire "Vice," I was initially inclined to take the word of so many critics who felt like "Don't Look Up" was bound to be shrill, hectoring and overly obvious, even for those who would be otherwise receptive to its message.

But then, I watched the film.

Granted, McKay's approach clearly reflects cult horror novelist Garth Marenghi's ethos that subtext is for cowards.

And yet, for all of this film's unsubtle railing against the superficiality of our entertainment-obsessed, corporatized culture, it is precisely the pitch of its unbelievable absurdity that makes it so horrifying and so hilarious in its plausibility.

Yes, the film's premise of "scientists discover an impending threat to all life on Earth, but politicians, big businesses, the media and idiots online all collude to ensure we can't do anything to prevent it" sounds more like a lecture than a movie.

But where McKay shines is in depicting exactly how this scenario plays out, with celebrities, chat shows, news networks, insanely wealthy tech developers and ostensible world leaders who don't exist in our world, but they could, without even toning down their inherent ridiculousness all that much.

Meryl Streep is unsettlingly familiar as the shallow, impulse-driven, politically calculating President Orlean, whose name is a nod to Streep's role in Charlie Kaufman's equally gonzo "Adaptation" in 2002, and whose worst instincts are cheered on by Jonah Hill as her infuriatingly stupid and cruel chief-of-staff son.

Meanwhile, Mark Rylance's placid-voiced childishness becomes terrifying as he plays the allegedly genius-level industrialist whose acquisitive "vision" threatens to doom humanity.

Leonardo DiCaprio does a remarkably understated job of playing Dr. Randall Mindy, the astronomer who confirms that a rogue comet will crash into the Earth in six months' time, as a "lifestyle idealist," in the film's words, since his scientific ethics are gradually eroded by his exposure to power and fame on levels his character has never before experienced.

And while Jennifer Lawrence's performance, as the grad student who actually discovered the comet, will likely divide the film's audiences as much as her character's unfiltered exasperation alienates the public in the world of "Don't Look Up," I couldn't help but appreciate her Millennial Big Mood of "I'm so done with all of this, and with all of you."

Standout cameos include former Hellboy Ron Perlman as the howlingly bigoted military veteran who's chosen to be an on-camera hero for the president's mission to stop the comet, and fresh from this year's "Dune," Timothée Chalamet as an outwardly nihilistic burnout punk kid who secretly harbors what turns out to be a sublime religious faith.

Because for a film that devotes most of its running time to castigating humanity for turning a blind eye to what matters most, "Don't Look Up" ends by celebrating humanity's ability to savor the seemingly trivial details that infuse our lives with so much joy, even when it's as mundane as characters debating the merits of store-bought versus homemade pies.

I'm reminded of the ending of Syfy's 2015 miniseries adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End," in which the last living human asks an alien, "You ever come across a civilization with cookie dough ice cream? We did that."

As thoroughly as "Don't Look Up" showcases humanity's self-delusion and self-destructiveness, I found it impossible to disagree with DiCaprio's Mindy when he offered the film's simple elegy for our species: "We had it all."

Stay tuned for laugh-out-loud bizarre midcredits and end-credits scenes revealing the fates of the president and her son.