A Game Natalie Portman and Jenna Ortega Can’t Save This Lame Art World Satire

PLOT: The owner (Natalie Portman) of a struggling art gallery in Miami tries to cover up an accidental death by passing it off as an art piece, which soon becomes a sensation.

REVIEW: The Gallerist marks director Cathy Yan’s return to indie filmmaking after a sojourn into blockbusters with her DC flick Birds of Prey. While always a visually inventive director, The Gallerist, which she co-wrote with James Pedersen, suffers from a clever premise that isn’t particularly well thought out or convincing.

The hook involves Portman’s gallery owner, Polina Polanski, who has financed her ambitious new project with a hefty divorce settlement from her multi-millionaire ex (Sterling K. Brown). Yet her business has fallen flat, and she and her assistant, Jenna Ortega’s Kiki, can’t even afford to fix a leaking air conditioner on the eve of an ambitious showcase by emerging artist Stella Burgess (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). When a visitor to the museum falls and winds up impaled on a deadly piece of art, Polina poses the dead body to look like an art piece, and in the hours that follow it becomes a viral sensation.

So, the premise is admittedly clever. Modern art is a topic that always lends itself well to satire (such as in another of this year’s Sundance entries, I Want Your Sex), but you never buy that Polina and her assistant Kiki would be able to pull off their soulless scheme, in which they plot to sell the body for even more money to keep the gallery afloat.

The movie takes great pains to establish the victim as someone truly loathsome, but the problem is that everyone in the film is equally vacuous and terrible. Portman’s Polina is portrayed as a caricature and never seems authentically human. While this gives Portman a juicy part to sink her teeth into, at a certain point Yan clearly wants us to have empathy for her, but it never happens. Jenna Ortega fares a bit better as her naïve assistant, with her part being more overtly comedic. But I never for a second believed that the hundreds of people visiting the gallery would ever be fooled by the very real, decaying corpse in front of them, nor that the characters would be able to pull off their scheme long-term, especially since the dead man is shown to have people looking for him and is also a well-known figure in the art world.

If Yan had made the film a full-on satire, it might have worked. But instead, she tries to mix in some sentimentality, with us expected to root for everyone to get away with their scheme because they’ve had a hard time making it in the cutthroat, mean art world. This is more a fault of the writing than anything else, as the cast is game. Portman and Ortega both do their best with the material, while the movie also features well-acted supporting roles from Ortega’s Wednesday co-star Catherine Zeta-Jones, Sterling K. Brown, and Daniel Brühl. Zach Galifianakis is also fun as a pretentious art influencer who plays an important role in the scheme. But even at only eighty-eight minutes, The Gallerist often felt like a chore to sit through, as the premise becomes harder and harder to swallow. It’s easily the biggest disappointment to emerge from this year’s Sundance—a misfire for all involved.

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