The new film “Malcolm & Marie” (coming Friday to Netflix), written and directed by Sam Levinson, leans blatantly on a row of hot buttons and shamelessly strives to make them loudly buzz while, at the same time, pontificating about art. It points to the familiar abyss where life and art meet, but it does so from a safe distance. It’s a movie about moviemaking, but it’s one of a diabolical vanity, in which Levinson, who’s white, creates a Black filmmaker-character as his stand-in and his mouthpiece, an artistic hero whose character and practice he then undercuts and whose ideas he subjects to critique, just enough to enact the cinematic equivalent of a media troll’s faux-innocent maneuver: he’s just raising questions.
Malcolm (John David Washington) is a director in his thirties. He and his girlfriend, Marie (Zendaya), a Black woman who’s in her twenties, have just attended the well-received première of his new feature, and have returned to a fancy house that his producers have rented for him. While Marie makes a pot of mac and cheese, Malcolm inveighs against white movie critics, and against one in particular, a woman with the L.A. Times, for seeing his film through a prism of race simply because both he and his movie’s protagonist are Black. He expressly denies that his work is “political”—Marie quickly reminds him that he’s writing a bio-pic of Angela Davis—and he explains, rather, that his new film is “a commercial film about a drug-addicted girl trying to get her shit together” and implores the critics, “Let us, the artists, have some fucking fun with this shit.” Then the Times critic’s review drops online, and it enrages Malcolm further—she calls the movie a “genuine masterwork” but praises the film in political terms and, moreover, questions, albeit glancingly, Malcolm’s representation of the Black female protagonist. He rants some more about what he considers the reduction of his new film to matters of “identity,” and boasts about his devotion to “the mystery of art,” by way of a shovelful of references to such classic filmmakers as Billy Wilder, Ida Lupino, and George Cukor, and the moderns Elaine May, Spike Lee, and Barry Jenkins.
These diatribes set the tone for the movie, but the drama is sparked by something that happened earlier that evening, at the screening: in his remarks to the première audience, Malcolm thanked his cast, crew, and other collaborators, but forgot to thank Marie. The omission is all the more grievous, Marie reminds him, because the movie is, as she puts it, about her—she’s a recovering drug addict whose experiences, which she’d described to him in detail, are represented in his movie. She’d even consulted with him on the script. Malcolm knew at once that he’d done wrong—he reminds Marie that he spent the evening copiously apologizing to her, and that she accepted his apologies—but, once they get back to the house, her pent-up anger bursts out. The fight, as they both call it, is the emotional backbone of Levinson’s drama. In calling Malcolm out for the ingratitude and the lack of empathy that his accidental oversight reflects, Marie brings up an enormous repertory of long-suppressed frustrations that boil down to: Malcolm has made use of her story for a movie that brings him fame and leaves her on the sidelines.
“Malcolm & Marie” is a lockdown movie: it was filmed during the pandemic, under constraints intended to keep the shoot safe for all involved. It’s set in a single, isolated location—entirely in and around a house, and with only the two actors. For Levinson, the practical limitations seem to have also confined his cinematic imagination. His film follows the format of a realistic one-act play that unfolds in real time, with embarrassingly literal staging (Levinson has a thing for his characters’ need to pee), with the addition of a couple of brief epilogues and one ever-so-mildly frame-breaking scene, which seems to wink at the constraints that he embraces unquestioningly and uncreatively.
In relying on the trope of a filmmaker deriding film critics for their posturing and ignorance, Levinson tries to give his movie immunity to criticism. By depicting a Black filmmaker who’s resistant to matters of politics and identity, he similarly gives himself cover to deliver an anti-woke rant of his own. (Malcolm even cites the term mockingly.) Levinson offers only the slightest flashes of self-deprecation or self-critique, and even they come off mostly as a flaunting of his own modesty and self-awareness, largely involving the collaborations inherent in filmmaking. Malcolm, meanwhile, is depicted as a really good director—with an asterisk. Marie, with her sharp insights into Malcolm’s behavior, provides the asterisk. She, in turn, is there only as the commentator on his life and art, his in-person critic; Malcolm’s last name is heard in the course of the film, but Marie’s never is. She has much to say and is a passionate, keenly perceptive character, yet, somehow, Levinson manages to turn the tables on her, too, and has Malcolm insist that only a lack of self-confidence gets in her way.
It’s unclear whether “Malcolm & Marie” is a historical drama set in a recent time before the pandemic, a near-future one set after it’s done, or a counterfactual history about what life would be like now for its characters had there been no pandemic. What is clear is that “Malcolm & Marie” has no actual present tense; it’s a movie that only pretends to consider the uneasy fusion of art and life but does so with a form that’s hermetically sealed against the most interesting and curiosity-sparking aspect of that connection: how a pandemic-lockdown movie is actually made. Its aesthetic is similarly impenetrable—the glossy black-and-white images, the smooth camera moves, the suave lighting present a hard shell of a movie surface that deflects attention from the very cinematic artistry that is supposedly its very subject. The aesthetic emulates the Hollywood classics that Malcolm reveres (his particular obsession is the director William Wyler) without suggesting that Levinson has at all reflected on the implications of the form—not least the exclusions, the elisions, the limits that the style and the manner, forged in the nineteen-thirties, might impose on filmmaking today, or how a modern filmmaker might transform them, expand them, or blast them open. (While boasting that his sensibility is informed by “Citizen Kane” and “The Best Years of Our Lives,” Malcolm also drops a passing word of praise for “Gone with the Wind” that hints, with no irony, at both his and Levinson’s historical obliviousness.)
The movie’s production values take the place of actual inspiration, originality, audacity; its simplistic dramatic unity keeps viewers on topic; the dialogue is on the nose throughout, suggesting an array of traits and backstory elements—themes and references that Levinson needs to fill in to make his points. He has the actors stand and deliver, sit and deliver, walk and deliver, lie down and deliver—they dispense his dialogue and go through the paces of the action with fluidity, energy, nuance, and commitment. The actors’ skill is in the foreground, and it’s impressive—it’s the one thing worth watching the movie for (remarkably, this is Zendaya’s first major dramatic-movie role). But Levinson spotlights that skill at the expense of emotional risk, including—indeed, especially—any of his own. “Malcolm & Marie” plays like a series of talking points, like a cinematized tweet thread that demands engagement—on its own narrow terms—and does so in the refined name of art. It cocks its head, lifts its chin, and says, “Debate me,” and its style says, “please.”
