Kinds of Kindness, and the White Album Film

Examination and analysis of works within a director’s filmography have long been aided by terms and categorizations borrowed from other artistic mediums. A specific film might be categorized as a director’s blue or cubist period, a la Picasso. The cinematography of Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and Altman’s “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” have been rightly characterized as pastoral, an aesthetic with an extensive history in literature, paintings, and music long before the advent of film. Dialogue can be Shakespearean, narrative themes Orwellian, conflicts Faustian. This cross-pollination of terminology makes for great coffee shop conversation and critical review; cinema is largely a synthesis of art forms, and it’s beneficial (as well as fun) to spider-web the discussion in as many directions as the work itself affords. To this end, and as a result of my attempt to best understand Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, I propose a new term into the lexicon of those winding, late-night discussions: the White Album film.

The Beatles’ “White Album” (actual title: The Beatles) is a wonderful mess. Instead of focusing on thematic or musical consistency, the band essentially splintered into four solo acts, recorded a heap of tunes that ran the gamut from harpsichord-driven takedowns of capitalism (“Piggies”) to lengthy apocalyptic tape loop experiments (“Revolution 9”), then data-dumped the lot across two vinyl discs. For the White Album and its descendants (such as Stevie Wonder’s “Songs in the Key of Life”, Led Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti”, and Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times”), the messiness is a feature, not a bug; by eschewing standard expectations of runtime or stylistic cohesion, these works allow the artist to indulge in what feels like “first idea, best idea” exploration, and the results are often an embarrassment of riches. With Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos exercises a sprawl similar to those musical albums, ultimately creating a work that follows the expansive form and function of other similarly sweeping “White Album films”.

During my first viewing of Kinds of Kindness, I was delighted by the strangeness of its form and slippery tone. There are three narratives, but they are not entirely distinct like a typical anthology film - one character, R.M.F., appears in each story of the triptych fable, and certain locations are revisited in separate stories (a specific hospital wing being the most prevalent). A core group of actors appears in all three chapters but in new roles each time. Is this meant to communicate an underlying connection between, say, Jesse Plemons’s Robert, Daniel, and Andrew? Probably not! But maybe! The stories all seem to squint at themes of control, the struggle for and release of autonomy, and the amount of sacrifice one will endure for acceptance (or force someone else to suffer for selfish means).

The film features vehicular homicide, fatal self-surgery, and drug-assisted rape, scenes of violence approaching the level found in many a Lanthimos joint. Conversely, it also includes mundane hilarity, such as a no-nonsense Willem Dafoe character revealing he hasn’t been wearing pants many minutes into a tense conversation. Elsewhere, Emma Stone expressionlessly shuffles through several celebratory dances after she’s finally discovered a miracle worker from her dreams. In one installment, Dafoe is as straightforward a “dad’ character as one can imagine; in the next, he is one of two alluring leaders of an isolationist sex cult. There is space across the three chapters for Lanthimos to draw up and explore characters that could have appeared in any number of his previous films; the fact that he has that central core of actors flex their respective abilities across wildly different roles underscores how intentional the variance of tone appears to be. Though each of the narratives has a conclusion of its own, none appear to have much (if any) import or influence on the others. Upon finishing the entire film (including a humdrum mid-credits scene where the recurrent and resurrected R.M.F. eats a sandwich), the overall experience may have left plenty of viewers scratching their heads, wondering “it was funny, it was dark, but what was the POINT of all that movie?”.

As I pondered this same question and tried to put my finger on what exactly I appreciated in Kinds of Kindness, I found myself thinking of films that left me with a similar sense of vastness and unspecificity, curiously poking around broad themes via swarms of characters and conflicts that barely cross paths (if at all). The titles that floated up were PTA’s Magnolia. Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander. Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Though you wouldn’t confuse any of these films for each other, they share several distinct characteristics. Sprawling and scattershot, overstuffed with extraneous characters and subplots (but no character cleanly labeled as the “lead”), messily overlong (but rarely slow); these films are bursting with ideas, jumping from one to the next, like someone waking and scrambling to put all the fleeting details of an incredible dream to paper before the memory fades. So if these films are glaringly distinct in form and concentration from the rest of a director’s oeuvre, what are the factors that led to their production?

For the aforementioned films, each came at an intentionally distinctive place within their director’s careers. Fanny & Alexander was intended to be Bergman's final film before retiring; in its 312 minutes, he revisits prominent themes from across his career (wrestling with faith, the blurry line between fantasy and reality, and family conflict) via multiple intersecting storylines within the Ekdahl family. Paul Thomas Anderson, given carte blanche for his next project after the success of Boogie Nights and realizing he’d never be in that position again, feverishly free-associated images, words, and ideas that ultimately snowballed into the separate storylines of the 3-hour Magnolia. Those threads only truly intersect at two points: an Aimee Mann cast sing-a-long and a biblically inexplicable rain of frogs. Across the 18 hours that comprise Twin Peaks: The Return, David Lynch reinhabits his 25-years-abandoned world of Twin Peaks, through the fragmented experimentation of his 2000s films Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire, to deliver a profoundly moving (and upsetting) meditation on death and loss, in what looks increasingly likely to be his final cinematic work.

Upon delivering Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos had been on somewhat of an atypical arc in his career. With The Favourite and Poor Things, Lanthimos directed off-kilter, high costume/production design period pieces from screenplays he did not write. Both were critical darlings, with Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Actress wins (Olivia Colman for The Favourite, Emma Stone for Poor Things). And for all their positive qualities and renown, the pair of films was a noticeable departure from the dry humor and horrifyingly bleak savage modernity of his works up to that point. Perhaps, then, Kinds of Kindness was Lanthimos returning to the well; by allowing himself to sprint in a few different directions at once, without much concern for tidying things up later, he found himself once again in the deep end of his purest instincts as a filmmaker.

When Kindness is placed in a row with those other White Album films, a theme seems to emerge: these are works where the director throws everything at the wall - not to see what sticks and trim the rest, but to make as big a mess as possible, invite the audience to let their focus go slack, and see what magic eye images may appear. Once in a career (if that), a director may find themselves drawn to making this mess to reorient themselves artistically, indulge with reckless abandon in a rare instance of creative and financial freedom, or place an emphatic, cosmic punctuation at the end of a career that has nothing left to prove. Typically eschewing a strong central narrative and protagonist, instead introducing as many characters and storylines as necessary to pursue a multitude of inspirational sparks amply, a White Album film may not be the filmmaker’s signature or “best” film, but they are likely to be the one that most nakedly shows you exactly who their director is. For Yorgos Lanthimos, that film is Kinds of Kindness.

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