The Lobster.

I watched The Lobster (amazoniTunes) because Tim Grierson and Will Leitch told me to. More specifically, they each named it one of their top six movies of the first half of 2016, and they raved about it on their indispensable podcast, and then my draft-blog colleague Chris Crawford told me he liked it, so I watched it. It is absolutely weird, one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen to actually star people I’ve heard of before, and in some ways it’s totally brilliant, even if the plot has holes and there are definitely moments that don’t quite come together.

The Lobster is a dystopian comic psychological horror-film romance, and sometimes manages to be a few of those things at the same time. Colin Farrell plays Dave, a somewhat hapless man whose wife is leaving him in the movie’s second scene – the first scene is too ridiculous to spoil – and who asks, in a bit of foreshadowing, if her new lover wears contacts. It turns out that Dave lives in a world where single people are sent to the Hotel, where, if they fail to find mates within 45 days, they’re turned into animals of their choosing. Dave chooses a lobster, and is congratulated for not choosing a dog, which most people choose, which is why there are so many dogs in the world. (The exact process by which this transformation takes place is, fortunately, not explained in the film.) Residents may add days to that spell if they help catch Loners, refugees from this mad state who live in the woods because they wish to be single, which apparently is seen as a sort of insanity in this alternate world. Dave eventually joins the Loners, then falls for a woman (Rachel Weisz) in their group, thus violating the Loners’ code and making them outcasts from both ends of this society.

Matches in this world occur on the basis of some shared flaw or issue; one girl (Jessica Barden), never identified by name, suffers from frequent nosebleeds, so another resident of the Hotel (Ben Whishaw) fakes nosebleeds to pair off with her. (Barden is adorable in her brief role and seems destined to appear in an Austen or Brontë adaptation.) Dave, thus, is looking for someone nearsighted like he is, although at one point he fakes being a sociopath to couple up with the woman in the Hotel who feels no emotions whatsoever and is the most efficient Loner catcher in the colony.

The whole endeavor is really nuts, and it’s made even more so by the absurd, robotic dialogue emanating from every character, as if they’re reading from a clinical or technical textbook. It takes social awkwardness to another level; these aren’t people who just can’t capture the rhythm of modern conversation, but can’t figure out what to talk about, ever.

Once Dave escapes the Hotel and joins the Loners, the humor fades, replaced by a claustrophobic sense once it becomes clear that the Loners’ lives are just as strictly regulated as those in the Hotel. (The humor isn’t gone, though; the Loners stage a raid on the Hotel at one point, and the way they torture the couples is brilliantly twisted.) Writers Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou spend the first half of the script appearing to decry our couples-obsessed civilization, right down to the idea of ‘matching’ by shared flaws or idiosyncracies, only to turn around and offer a take nearly as dark on remaining single. The entire film eschews any simple answers to the question of whether happiness comes through relationships, through self-reliance, or through any single prescription – even parenthood gets a sideswipe in the film’s funniest line.

Then there is The Lobster‘s ending, deliberately ambiguous, befitting the film’s overall theme, but one that I could see sparking debates for years. Does Dave return to the table? Does he complete the act we see him starting in the bathroom? Was Weisz’s unnamed character only pretending? What possible future could these two people have in a society where being single is essentially illegal, but where they lack the marriage certificate that the police ask for like identity papers?

Farrell is a revelation in this role, a sad-sack with an unfashionable hairdo and dated mustache who refuses to give up on life or the possibility of happiness; his is the one fully-realized character in the film, and you could interpret the whole exercise through his eyes alone, with the others all props in his quest for meaning. Léa Seydoux (Blue is the Warmest Color) makes quite a bit of her role as the leader of the Loners, by turns compassionate and diabolical. Whishaw, John C. Reilly, and Broadchurch‘s Olivia Colman all add value in bit parts, but none of their characters have any depth to work with.

By the end, The Lobster reminded me tremendously of the films of Charlie Kaufman, a screenwriter who has some of the best ideas in film writing, but who struggles to see them through to a full plot. The first half of The Lobster sings as you explore its dystopian world, and the second half still has some of those moments, but the pacing becomes erratic as the movie progresses, and the plot begins to fray, especially in how the Leader finds out about Dave and his paramour, to try to add some narrative tension. But it’s a clever, insightful vision, thought-provoking on the hard subject of happiness without falling into easy answers, and the movie’s refusal to package everything neatly for us at the end feels like the only appropriate resolution for this kind of story. In the spirit of Grierson & Leitch’s show, I give it a solid B.

Comments

  1. Lanthimos’s “Dogtooth” is as far out as it gets. I would enjoy reading your take on it some day.

  2. Keith,

    Slightly peripheral to the topic at hand, but are there other movie podcasts that you listen to and recommend? I ask because I too am a huge fan of Grierson and Leitch and am always looking for others, particularly those which are done for people who have already seen the movie.

  3. OT, wanted to share this gem currenly featured on ESPN.com:

    “Tim Tebow’s first at bat lasts eight pitches. He grounded a 3-2 pitch to second base, moving a runner over. Didn’t look overmatched by a pitcher who spent this season in Triple A.”

    Just gonna leave this here.