Actor Jason Schwartzman in a scene from Mountainhead.Crave
Before he transformed the idea into a hit HBO television series, the British screenwriter Jesse Armstrong first wrote Succession as a film.
I’ve always been curious what kind of movie Armstrong’s original screenplay – which landed on the so-called “Black List” of best unproduced screenplays of 2010 – would have resulted in.
Armstrong’s new HBO film that premieres in Canada on Saturday night on Crave (8 p.m. ET) may be the closest we’ll ever get to seeing what that would have looked like.
While not a Succession spin-off per se, Mountainhead certainly seems to exist in an expansion of its universe – where the characters and the satire are both extremely rich.
The film begins with a bit of exposition, efficient if not all that elegant, that sets up the background of the story through news footage.
Traam, a social media site used by billions around the world, has introduced a new suite of artificial intelligence features. Without any moderation, they have led to bad actors to create real-time deepfakes that have quickly sparked violent and even genocidal conflict all around the globe.
Despite this worldwide chaos he’s created, Traam’s cocky owner Venis (Cory Michael Smith) – the richest man in the world and, from a brief glimpse of his parenting style, at least partly modelled on Elon Musk – is headed off on a weekend retreat with his tech-bro besties.
An oversized SUV, private jet and helicopter ride away is a new mountaintop mansion in the Canadian Rockies that has been built by Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who, with a net worth of merely $500-million, is considered the poorest of his billionaire pals. Indeed, he’s nicknamed Soupy, short for Soup Kitchen, for that reason.
(Yes, Hugo has named his retreat Mountainhead in an apparently non-ironic homage to objectivist novelist Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.)
Also joining on this jaunt are Randall (Steve Carrell), described as a “Dark Money Gandalf” and unwilling to admit that all the wealth in the world cannot cure the type of cancer he has; and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who has a modicum of ethics compared to the others and a rival AI platform that quickly could undo all the damage that Traam is doing – but only if Venis names the right price.
Actors Steve Carell, centre, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef in a scene from Mountainhead.Crave
Full of poetically garbled tech jargon and inventively profane put-downs, Armstrong’s screwball dialogue in this film is as enjoyable – and unquotable in this newspaper – as Succession’s at its most absurd.
His satire is sharpest in the ways he parodies tech-bro libertarian stances.
In self-serving denial of the effect of Traam is having, Venis recalls that when the Lumière Brothers showed their first movie of a train, the audience jumped for cover. “The answer to that was not stop the movies,” he says, with the type of specious argument one normally has to pay big bucks to hear at a Munk Debate. “The answer was show more movies.”
Randall follows up with his own risible reasoning to ignore the suffering of others, delivered in a sarcastic tone: “There will be eight to 10 cardiac arrests during the Super Bowl. Stop the Super Bowl!”
For all its line-by-line dark pleasures, Mountainhead would quickly grow tiring were it not for the fact that Armstrong’s plotting of shifting power dynamics among these four is pretty clever as well.
Venis has to dance around how to get Jeff’s AI without compromising his pride, while Randall goes deeper and deeper into dangerous delusion as he imagines that perhaps Traam’s “creative destruction” might speed up the eventuality of transhumanism and the ability for his consciousness to be uploaded to the mainframe.
Then, there’s insecure Hugo who will go along with any plan as long as someone invests in his meditation app that he hopes might finally push him over a billion in net worth.
There is, however, an unresolved tension at the heart of Mountainhead, as there was in Succession, between how much the audience hates these characters and also enjoys spending time laughing at (with?) them – and how to balance the fact that the ultra-rich are beyond the reach of consequences, while satisfying the desire to punish them.
Unable to really have his characters develop or truly grapple with the implications of their actions without humanizing them, Armstrong returns to his old underwhelming stand-by – scenes in which his monsters stare into the distance miserably, or look at themselves in the mirror as if try to the find shreds of humanity behind their mask.
Ultimately, with so much of Mountainhead’s action taking place in a single location, you see how Armstrong’s style of writing is suited for a TV screen over a big one – and why it’s for the best Succession didn’t happen as a movie.
Indeed, you could even see Mountainhead dropped on a stage, with minimal edits to the script. Finally, male actors who wanted to explore the depths of toxic masculinity and American capitalism would have a more up-to-date work than David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross (incidentally, now on in New York starring Kieran Culkin).
