Comedy as Tragedy

Don’t Look Up a film by Adam McKay.  With Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett. *****

Don’t Look Up is a comic masterpiece, the Dr. Strangelove of our time.  It holds a mirror up to this country and captures it exactly.  You watch this movie and laugh until you cry.  Then you just cry.  Or you laugh some more.  You don’t know what to do.  You stick your head out the window and scream.

Writer/director Adam McKay got his start writing Saturday Night Live skits, moved up to full-length features that made fun of current trends, like Anchorman and Tallageda Nights, then stepped up to a comedy that was essentially serious, The Big Short.  He followed that with Vice, which wasn’t exactly a comedy but should have been: a former frat boy at Yale decides to run for President because his father did and in order to outdo his older brother, whom everybody thinks is presidential material; when looking for a running mate he goes to a right-wing hack who was a crony of his father and who agrees to run if he can be co-President if they win.  Which the frat boy more or less agrees to.  Then they actually win, well really they don’t, but they do, when a biased Supreme Court pushes them over the top.  (Looking back, isn’t that perhaps where this country began to unravel?  The person they defeated became a spokesman for the one issue that we really should have focused on all this time, and that might have been the centerpiece in his presidency.)

Vice should have been a satire.  It should have been a laff riot where we were all saying, no, c’mon, this could never happen.  You’re taking this too far.  Except that it did happen.  That wasn’t a skit.  It was what happened.

And now we have Don’t Look Up, which in so many ways seems even more absurd (the President’s Chief of Staff is her son.  Who carries around the nuclear codes in a $30,000 Birkin bag.  Isn’t that absurd?  Or is it, if the Republican frontrunner becomes President again?  The whole cabinet may be named Trump).  It takes a situation that is possible, though unlikely, and uses it to reflect a situation that is cold hard fact.  People react exactly the way they react to everything.  It’s dead-on perfect.

Even those Saturday Night Live skits were serious in their own way.  They took the basic facts of the news and stretched them a little.  But now you can’t stretch them.  You can’t be more absurd than reality.  When people go to rallies holding up signs that say Vaccines Kill, we’re in Never Never land.  It’s impossible to make fun of it.  Laughing is crying.

The movie has apparently gotten mixed reviews.  It all looks too easy, or too obvious, some damn thing (I haven’t read the reviews).  The response to the movie demonstrates what the movie is pointing out.  People don’t want to look at the issue, and that’s McKay’s whole point.

Here’s the plot, if you haven’t heard it already:  A grad student named Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a massive comet that is hurtling toward earth.  To quote a line of her dialogue: “We have exactly six months, ten days, two hours, 11 minutes and 41 seconds, until a comet twice the size of Chicxulub tears through our atmosphere and extincts all life on Earth.”  (Chicxulub is the asteroid that hit earth 66 million years ago and wiped out 75% of life on earth, including the dinosaur population.)  She tells this information to her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) who realizes they’ve got to get the word out, and contacts a scientist and advisor at NASA, Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan).  He thinks they should take this news to the President.  That’s where the fun begins.

President Orlean (Meryl Streep)—facing a tough fight over a Supreme Court nominee who is apparently a former porn actor—first stonewalls the trio for a whole day, then decides just to sit on the issue.  She can’t take it up.  After absorbing this mind-blowing reaction, the three confederates—Mindy, Dibiasky, and Oglethorpe—go to the media.  They get on the top morning show, where the power couple is a genial African American man named Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry), and his smart, sophisticated, very white co-host, Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett).  Their thing is keeping things lite and entertaining; a rock star will precede our friends in their segment (and make up with her straying boyfriend on camera.  He actually proposes on a Zoom call).  Dr. Mindy is hyperventilating before he goes on, but acquits himself well, pretty much by sitting there and looking good.  Dibiasky, however, finally loses it on screen, dropping some f-bombs and giving the world the straight truth.  Telling the truth doesn’t work for morning TV.  Brie takes a shine to Dr. Mindy, practically starting an affair right on screen.  He soon becomes a media star (because of his good looks!).

The President in the meantime has checked with some Ivy League professors and decides this is a serious situation, that they need to nuke the asteroid, but make the whole thing into a media event.  They get a profane and obscene former astronaut to go up and make the hit (you always need a hero).  He actually launches and is on his way, when a heavy donor to the Republican party—a phone mogul named Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance, in the most brilliant comedic role in the whole movie; you will never meet a weirder character than Peter Isherwell)—decides there’s a way to do this so they can make a profit.  The mission is aborted.

I could go on.  I could recite the plot of the entire movie.  It sounds like a ridiculously absurd comic spoof, but it isn’t.  It’s our historical moment writ large.  This hurtling asteroid is climate change, or it’s the pandemic, or it’s any number of other things, where intelligent human beings could get together and see what needs to be done, but unfortunately that can’t happen.  It turns into a political football, where some people believe it, and some don’t (the President eventually decides those are the people she wants to appeal to.  Their motto: Don’t Look Up).  The issue is all over social media in a world where every nit wit must be allowed to have his opinion, even if he thinks that Down is Up.  You might as well laugh as you watch this; you might as well scream with laughter.  Otherwise you’ll just be screaming.

To his credit, McKay doesn’t stop short of the full catastrophe: there’s a wonderful Last Supper scene where our heroes—and an unlikely crew they are—are resigned to their fate.  We see a variety of people around the world preparing for their imminent demise, and it’s oddly moving.  (It also has it’s absurd moments.  Our profane astronaut friend takes out his six shooters and tries so shoot the asterioid, the moral equivalent of Slim Pickens riding the nuke off into eternity).  The movies last words belong to the President’s son Jason (Jonah Hill), and they’re perfect: “What’ up, y’all? I’m the last man on Earth. Shit’s all fucked up. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. We out here.”

Have you noticed that this is one of the great casts in movie history?  I haven’t even mentioned everybody.  The acting is great, as is the direction, the writing, everything.  The writers let it all out in the method of the great comic writers of the late Sixties.  Terry Southern is applauding from his grave.  You should no longer be reading this piece; you should long since have signed up for Netflix and started watching this movie.  It will cheer you up or drive you out of your mind, make you into an activist, something.