Plot: A group of billionaire friends get together against the backdrop of a rolling international crisis.
Review: Jesse Armstrong has been behind some of the best writing of the last three decades, going back to the biting British comedies Peep Show and The Thick of It, along with the classic Black Mirror episode “The Entire History of You,” before he hit it huge with his HBO series Succession. Making his feature directorial debut with the HBO film Mountainhead, Armstrong combines the strongest satirical elements from his writing career into a prescient look at four of the wealthiest men on the planet debating and quarrelling as society crumbles around them. Mountainhead is a brilliant character study that is incredibly timely and disturbing as to what may happen behind closed doors that most of us will never get to open.
Imagine if Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman all hung out together over long weekends, toying with the fate of society. Now, imagine all four of them were backstabbing, pedantic, childish monsters who would be willing to kill millions of innocent people if it meant securing their fortune. That is the crux of Mountainhead, which replaces those four tycoons with Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef. Meeting at Hugo Van Yalk’s (Jason Schwartzman) remote Colorado home dubbed Mountainhead, elder CEO Randall (Steve Carell), upstart tech innovator Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and social media giant Venis (Cory Michael Smith) meet just as Venis’ new online tool goes live and sends the world into an uproar as to what is fake, A.I.-generated news and what is reality. As the world crumbles in riots and violence, the four elite men enjoy drinking, smoking, and measuring their bankrolls against each other. It is like when we hung out with our best friends in high school, only with much more money.
As the global crisis worsens and the four friends watch it unfold on their phones, the conversation shifts to which countries they could take over and which should be responsible for what. What begins as jokes and hypothetical begins to gain traction as the quartet call out each other’s shortcomings and the men begin to align against each other, coming up with increasingly deranged plays to usurp one another. Calling themselves The Brew Crew or Brewster’s Roosters, the exclusive club devolves from a real-life game of Monopoly into something closely resembling Clue. Holding the potential fate of modern society in their hands, Randall, Hugo, Jeff, and Venis turn into an educated group of primitives, and it is hilariously disturbing to watch. Hugo constantly worries about his lack of hitting a billion in wealth, while Venis struggles to maintain control of his company without the AI oversight that Jeff’s technology can provide. Randall watches this unfold and questions allegiances, stoking the divide between the men.
Aside from a minor supporting role from Hadley Robinson as Jeff’s girlfriend, Hester, most of the film is centered on the four leading actors. Hot off his turn in Netflix’s The Four Seasons, Steve Carell plays Randall as an eloquent speaker whose measured emotions are breaking. Jason Schwartzman is hilarious as the wannabe of the group, while Ramy Youssef continues to shine in roles that allow his natural comedic cadence to deliver biting dialogue. Cory Michael Smith steals the film after his equally excellent performance in Saturday Night as Chevy Chase. Smith is a blend of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and plays Venis as a demented and disturbed man with limitless resources. All four actors are great in playing their roles straight while barely concealing that no matter how rich someone can be, human beings are flawed idiots, and giving an idiot a lot of money sometimes makes you dumber. That undercurrent of stupidity exists throughout Mountainhead and scared me to think some of the real power players in our world today could be this immature.
Audiences will be drawn to Mountainhead thanks to Jesse Armstrong’s inclusion and references in marketing to Succession. In many ways, Mountainhead shares a lot in common with the acclaimed HBO series, but this is definitely not a movie version of that show. Yes, the musical score from Nicholas Britell echoes the piano themes of Succession, but that is where the similarities end. Armstrong’s writing gives the four leads plenty of solid dialogue that sounds both poetic and ripe with sarcasm, but Mountainhead does not wallow in brutal insults thrown around like Kieran Culkin and Brian Cox were apt to. Instead, this is a contained story that keeps the framing closer to a stage play with the characters either interacting as a group or in different pairings and trios that allow for paranoia and anxiety to infiltrate the relationships and turn a classy weekend of food and poker into a microcosm of the violence occurring around the world of the film. It is scary and funny at the same time, which itself is scary and funny.
Mountainhead shows that Jesse Armstrong’s brand of social commentary is still as biting as it was on Veep, Succession, and Black Mirror. Should he explore this storytelling approach further, Mountainhead proves it can be done in a feature-length running time without wasting a minute. I would have loved for this story to have been more brutal and dark than it was. However, it still works as a great example of how satire can work as entertainment and an equal indictment of the real world. Boasting four impressive performances and another standout from Cory Michael Smith, Mountainhead is another winning original from HBO and one of the scariest non-horror movies of the year.
Mountainhead premieres on May 31st on HBO.
Source:
JoBlo.com
