The Prestige TV Podcast - Unpacking the Layers of 'Malcom & Marie'

Episode Date: February 10, 2021

Amanda Dobbins and Sean Fennessey discuss the controversial movie 'Malcom & Marie,' written and directed by Sam Levinson and starring Zendaya and John David Washington. Hosts: Amanda Dobbins and Sean Fennessey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know what, Malcolm? I feel like once you know someone is there for you and once you know they love you, you never actually think of them again. So until you're about to lose someone that you finally pay attention. Well, what is it, Marie? What do you want? Really? Do you want to go there? Yes.

Okay. Because you can't imagine. The reason I'm with you is because I love you. Everything that you've been through, everything. That's what made you. The girl that I love, the girl that I fuck with. I'm here. All I wanted tonight was thank you, Malcolm.

That is it. You know that I'm thankful. You know that I made a mistake. So why turn it into something more? Because it's about how you see this relationship. Look at me. I'm the last person's day. It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot.

Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill 3-burner gas grill. Or get $50 off the select Weber Spirit Grill and bring big flames. to your backyard, then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th, Exclusion supplies to homebopo.com slash price match for details. Hello and welcome to TV concierge, a ringer podcast where we help you navigate the wide world of streaming. I am Amanda Dobbins, a co-host of The Big Picture, and this week, my co-host, Sean Fentasy, and I discussed Malcolm and Marie. the new somewhat controversial Netflix movie written and directed by Sam Levinson and starring Zendaya and John David Washington.

This is an excerpt from that conversation. This is a fascinating document. Amanda, I will say of all the movies that we have talked about during quarantine, I have looked forward to this conversation with you the most. And there are a great many reasons for that. This is a complex movie and a complex document of history. You want to give us some of the specs on how this movie came to be? Yes. So this is one of the first in quarantine produced films.

It was written by Sam Levinson. The legend goes at Zendaya's behest. After production of Euphoria, season two was halted. And it was written and directed by Sam Levinson, starring Zendaya and John David Washington and filmed in a beautiful house. We will talk more about the Caterpillar House later. Don't worry. And it was filmed in quarantine.

and then acquired by Netflix for $30 million. So this was a, I guess there was a big bidding war for this movie. It's a movie that we have probably referenced more times than any other movie we hadn't seen on the show over the course of the last year. And Levinson, of course, is the creator of Euphoria. He's a director of a couple of films before this. One in particular called Assassination Nation, which plays significantly into this story. So this is a movie about a young up-in-com. coming director and his girlfriend on the night of the premiere of his big new film.

And they return to that caterpillar house, which I guess has been rented by the production for them to occupy during the release of this movie. And they descend into relationship hell. They engage in a series of disagreements, fights, rage-filled soliloquies over the course of a night in that beautiful home. It's inspired by Levinson's failure to thank his wife and producer Ashley Levinson at the Sundance premiere of his last. Film Assassination Nation.

And, you know, it's a big, broad movie that is all conversations that are essentially discursive about art and intent and ownership and criticism and love and addiction and a lot of big, heavy themes. It's drawn some comparisons, both positive and negative to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, to the work of John Cassavetes, to a lot of films about this sort of nature of confinement. I thought of Richard Linklater's tape a couple of times as I was watching this. There are a number of movies that are like this

where two people are stuck together and they ostensibly have love and affection for each other, but they tear each other apart. And that's really what this is. The style is notable. How would you describe some of the stylistic choices in the movie?

Aggressive? It's very stylized. It's shot in black and white by Marcel Rev. There is a very obvious... And on the nose, but I still think pretty good soundtrack, including songs like James Browns down in New York City. I forgot to be your lover. A great scene to get rid of him, the Dionne Warwick song. And more, the songs do some of this storytelling while also kind of filling in some of the fact that this is like two people in a house just like talking for almost two hours.

Obviously, we mentioned the Caterpillar House, just absolutely beautiful. If you like watching a movie in a, you know, design museum, this will at least scratch that itch. And it's, you know, it's shot in order to both enhance the house and also kind of bring in some of the sculptural and design elements at the house itself. The camera's noticeable. The camera's, you know, doing one, doing a lot of tricks, which, again, two people in one house, like one location for two hours. You got to do something, I guess, to enhance the intention. but that is definitely happening. So there's, it's just,

it's really obviously stylized. Yeah. And Marcel Rev, who you mentioned is a, a collaborative collaborative Levinson's on Euphoria, his HBO television series. I'd like to talk about Euphoria a little bit

in the course of this conversation as I watched that show and I'm a fan of that show. And it'll be interesting to see who is and isn't watching that show with regard to the conversation around this movie. But the performances are a huge part of it. Because as you and I are, want to do. We love to talk about movie stars. I think Zendaya and John David Washington over the last

three years or so have emerged as really exciting people at the center of movies. And so just the prospect of this movie seemed like a huge deal. Zendaya has worked with Levinson so much over the course of the past couple of years, making euphoria. And she seems really comfortable with what he does, with what his style is. And we'll talk about what his writing style and the performance style that he's after and the content of what he wants to explore in a little bit. But I thought she was really impressive in this movie. And if this movie has gotten any awards buzz, it has been primarily for her. She is, you know, she comes out of the Disney system.

And she is probably best known at this point for appearing in Spider-Man movies. But I think she's an actress with a lot of depth, someone who is eager to disassemble what it means to be emotional. You know, there is like, I think a lot of female characters are for, to engage in the imagination of male writers, and that is often unkind, unfair, a little bit ill-informed. I think between Zendaya,

and you see this specifically in Euphoria, and a little bit in this movie, too, I can feel Sam Levinson and Zendaya working something out together about what they want to say about an experience. And I think she's damn good in this movie. And I really like watching her, and it makes me excited about what she's going to do in the future.

Yes, I agree with you. I think you can feel her familiarity with not just the writer, but the type of writing and the sense that in this, she knows how to deliver this type of dialogue and also that Sam Levinson kind of knows how to write for her and knows her capacity a bit more. The character is more of a showcase, which I still think it's like maybe the less developed character. We can, you know, we can talk about that. But, you know, it's a character and reaction to the main character. But she gets to do both kind of like the big over the top stuff and the smaller vulnerable moments. There is like a range of emotions and things that Zendaya gets to express over the course of the film. And I think she's very good at it.

She really does know how to handle this very wordy dialogue and the kind of these very upfront emotions. And she also, you know, has that presence and can communicate the emotion and the swing of things like without the word. Yeah, she has a kind of bluntness in her delivery, like a bubble-popping kind of quality when she speaks, where you realize that she is trying to take the air out of somebody else's expectation while also trying to honestly communicate how she's feeling. And it's, I mean, it feels as much like a, it feels born of her personality in a way. You can almost see her in real life having those affectations. And if they know each other well, obviously, you can write to that. John David Washington, he plays the filmmaker. And well, let's just say that this person, um, is carrying a lot of water. This character has to do a lot of work and how much of that work is particularly autobiographical is something we will definitely talk about. But he has a tough job, John David Washington.

Huge fan of his. We praised him over and over again as we talked about Tenet. We praised him for his working black Klansman. Obviously, this is a son of Denzel Washington. He knows from whence he comes. He's got a lot of experience and understands how the star system works, how Hollywood works. He has many a monologue in this movie.

I enjoyed his athleticism. I think he is sometimes a little bit ill-served by the writing in the movie. Yes, 100% agree. I mean, he just has to say so much. It's like the monologues just keep going. And he is definitely giving them at a sprint the whole time. You know, and that's a choice. But you just kind of can't believe that there is more to be said at some point.

And I place that on the script. and not his performance. I think he also is not given room to really fluctuate in motions, emotions as much, which is, again, the script, but, and a little bit the character and I guess a little bit, the arc of the movie is that this character is supposed to be all ego and bravado and stubbornness and doesn't get to do anything except just puff himself up for the majority of the film. but it, yeah, he seems tired. Let me ask you a question before we get into the specific details of the writing.

Do you think that the John David Washington character is the villain of this movie? Well, I think villain is a tough word. I think, and we kind of just like have to talk about the writing and the structure of the movie while discussing this. So we can just segue into that. But, you know, I think maybe the movie. movie's point and depending on your perspective, it's flaw, is that he's wrong. Like, he's just wrong. Like, that character is, like, very clearly wrong and no spoilers, but the entire structure of the film centers on him just, like, being wrong. And, like, in the argument, at

least, like, these are two people having a fight, and just, like, one person is just wilding and incorrect the whole time. And it's like, and you can both feel that exasperation, which is possibly the point, but also when you're watching a two-hour movie at some point, you can just like be a little exasperated. One of our friends shared like a TikTok. I wish that I remembered the creator's name of someone pretending to be Malcolm and Marie's neighbor. And just being like, I already texted Marie being like you can come over. Like he's still going. Like he's just, and that is definitely a reaction. But I do think that the movie knows some of that. because it's about the Malcolm character

and trying to get that Malcolm character to the place of being able to say, spoiler, thank you. Yeah. So whether he's the villain is really a question of how self-aware the film is and how what sides the film wants to take and or how much you want to project

your own experiences, you know, in a relationship and or like dating a egotistical dude onto the film. But I do think the film knows he's wrong. Villain versus Hero is obviously a simplistic binary. And I only ask that to kind of provoke your thoughts specifically to understand how we see the movie because the way that we see the movie is it is intrinsic to the experience of the movie because there's so much conversation about the movie.

And critics in particular have really reacted for the most part very negatively to this movie. And the reason for that is in the writing, the film, is not just like, say, faces or shadows or a woman under the influence or who's afraid of Virginia or Wolf, which are these emotionally volatile, heavily written theatrical style, stage, play, executions of intimate stories. Those stories are about love and confusion and frustration and the differences between men and women often. They're not really about film criticism. And this movie, in some cases, is about film criticism. At certain points,

it is only about film criticism and it is not about the relationship between these two people. In many, in many two or three intervals of the movie, Malcolm has lost the thread of the conversation about his relationship and has plunged into his own narcissism while thinking about his work as a writer-director, thinking about the reception of his movie, thinking about the way that other people write about him and what the expectations are of him. and you could certainly make the case that it hurts the movie by saying by by sort of moving the needle away from Marie and solely onto Malcolm's acrobatic speechifying

you could also say that it clarifies what you're saying which is that Malcolm is wrong that Malcolm is in his own head that he's selfish that he's narcissistic that he can't see the force for the trees of his own experience in life and it underlines his frailty you have to be generous I think to do that. I will say when I watched the movie, that was how I saw the movie. And that was why I certainly did not have the same reaction. I'll just say right now, I liked this movie. I thought

it was a kind of provocation that I enjoyed. I thought it was actually pretty funny at times. And is it overwritten? Yes. I've said that probably a few times on this podcast now. It feels like a movie that someone had been waiting five years to write, but wrote in one night, if that makes sense. Yes. Yeah. Listen, I liked this movie too. I have some notes, which we're about out to give at great length. And I, you know, I know that that is a sentence that strikes fear or anger in all the people in my life and also probably the writer-director of this film. So, fair enough, you know, you have, sure. I'm happy to answer for whatever I say, but I did like it. I think execution matters. And a few of those speeches that are

provocative and opening ideas that are definitely interesting to me as a person who thinks about film criticism and also just like who likes to watch people argue, which, you know, we can explore that or not. But there is a, they just go on for a very long time. Like editing matters, how you write something, how you construct it, how you construct a fight, how you develop those characters, how you express the motivations, how you ask for the audience patients and for how long and how much you put people in discomfort versus like, you know, intellectual simulation. All of that matters. And I do think, to your point about it, just being written all in one night, feels like very like first dump draft at times, right? And there is like a first dump drafts are great,

but that's not the one that you should file to the editor. Just FYI, some free writing tips. Yeah. You know, I think, um, I don't know ultimately if the movie is meant to be Sam Levinson's essay on the necessity of film criticism or if it is meant to be a portrayal of two people who are maybe in love or maybe not in love and trying to sort their way through that. It tries to have both of those things. And that's really the struggle of the movie. Yeah. I mean, that's what's so interesting also is that we've spent all this time talking about it. We have like not talked about Zendaya's character. Like we've talked about how she's very good at the dialogue and that she could, she was nominated for a Critics Choice Award. She might be nominated. She is the person. Everyone's

like, annoying movie, but Zendaya is good. But like, completely in essential to everything that we discussed. And there is another layer in this film about, you know, who owns a story and is a film like a director's vision or do other people contribute and all of that stuff. That, the conclusion of the film is a bit clearer there. And so I guess it's a little less interesting to talk about or also we're not critics or I don't identify as a critic. You can do that if you want. But we're certainly closer to that strain of dialogue than the others. And we're, you know, narcissistic people too. So it's what we're most interested in. It's true. The one thing that I, the other story,

I guess small slash major thing to your point about Zendaya's character is at the end of this movie, my reaction was, and I don't think this is a spoiler, these people should not be together. They don't make sense to each other. They maybe served a purpose to one another and had love for each other, but they have perhaps wrung it out of their relationship. On the other hand, if you came into my home on the darkest nights between my wife and I, and you heard some of the things that we said to each other, not quite this abrasive. This is a very aggressive movie.

But if you saw how we interacted, when we were not getting along, you might say the same thing about us. And I think the movie is trying to manifest that feeling and create a sense of universality. But because there's three soliloquies about film criticism in the movie, no one is taking that out of the movie.

The people who are writing about the movie are not taking that out of the film, that there is a kind of universality of emotional volatility in relationships. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is that my takeaway from this movie was just like, well, she was right. And this guy's very stupid and he could have just like apologized and this would be over. Like, she's just like, it's so one-sighted that the detours and the

weird things about film criticism and how they fight or what's interesting because the other thing is just like, well, he fucked up. And then they were like mad at each other for a while and people fight. You know, it's not a lot of drama in that for me personally. As is to be expected, your take on this was that she's right. But like she is. The movie admits it. Like literally. the last scene. It's so, you know, and again, we can talk about, like, the construction of this movie and, like, what it thinks through and what it doesn't. But, like, no shit.

He should have just been, like, thank you. Like, you fucked up, buddy. Like, that's, that's it. Thank you again for listening. If you want to hear more of that conversation, you can find it on the big picture feed. And we will be back on TV concierge later this week.