Malcolm & Marie, 2021.
Directed by Sam Levinson.
Starring Zendaya and John David Washington.
SYNOPSIS:
A director (John David Washington) and his girlfriend (Zendaya) return home from a movie premiere and their relationship is tested as they await the first critical reactions to his film.
The discourse surrounding Malcolm & Marie is likely to be as heated and polarised as the many arguments that make up Sam Levinson’s monochrome exercise in perfume-ad cool. It’s a sexy as all hell, single location stage-play which walks a very fine line between alienating self-indulgence and unavoidable tedium, which keeps its balance largely thanks to a stunning performance from Zendaya.
The opening twenty minutes are excellent. The entirety of Malcolm & Marie feels like a short film writ large, and this initial gambit captures everything that’s great about the movie. The power found in this sequence in which our young lovers return from a successful movie premiere in an antithesis of moods lays in what’s left unsaid. They’re occupying the same physical space, but due to a combination of silent pauses and distant looks, largely from Zendaya’s Marie, they couldn’t feel further apart. It’s tense, awkward, and carries a burgeoning sense of unease at the thought this steam cooker could be about to whistle and blow at any point.
When it does eventually give, what was an exercise in controlled restraint and beautifully shot voyeurism into this couple’s strange life, quickly evolves into a monologue heavy two-hander in which they’re unforgivably mean to one-another, over-and-over again, to the point where you’d rather look away or go into another room.
They spit verbiage on their sexual escapades, vices, bodies, race, film-criticism, and they do so with a passion and power that makes you feel the point of the barb from the films harshest of lines, but after while it’s too exhausting to care about what they’re saying. You end up feeling like a third person in the relationship, which on one hand is an achievement in immersion, but spending nearly two-hours with them is something of an endurance test.
Ensuring that you stay beyond the aggressively eaten macaroni and cheese (you’ll see) are two career-best performances from Washington and Zendaya. He flips between this easy-to-watch laid-back energy and a hyperactive opposite whenever the script lights his fuse, quickly snapping into poetic anger that can be electrifying and intimidating. However, performance wise he exists in the shadow of Zendaya, whose Marie demands your attention with the low-key way in which she imbues her character with layers to chip away at. This could be a silent movie (and probably better for it without all of the pontificating) and she’d still convey more than most actors do with reams of dialogue.
In fact, some of the clearest means of communication between Malcolm & Marie is via their choice of music. If the wordplay exchanges are sometimes too painful (in every sense of the word) to endure, then rest-assured the soundtrack is one to see you through 2021.
Spending time with Malcolm & Marie isn’t exactly fun, and it all has a layer of artificiality which makes it hard to care about the warring couple, but if you’re after a stylishly shot acting master-class from Washington and Zendaya, then this remains an impressive showcase for their talents.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★
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