Mountainhead: More fast-talking billionaire backchat from the ‘Succession' creator leaves nothing unsaid
The Emmy Award-winning scribe doesn't mess about. Six months ago, Armstrong hadn't yet developed a working script for Mountainhead. Shooting commenced in March, wrapped in April, and the film was completed in May.
A phenomenally quick turnaround, then, even by today's speedy industry standards. Why the sudden rush?
Beats me, but Mountainhead imagines a world where troublesome online platforms spread toxic lies, and where greasy billionaires interfere in global politics. Sound familiar?
Armstrong takes aim at icky tech bros and problematic investors. His film is funny and scary, a ballsy, blistering satire that practically goes out of its way to match and indeed mimic the brilliant chaos of Succession.
This, I suppose, is a good thing. There are shades of Dr Strangelove and – much later – The Shining. Unusual comparisons, for sure, but Mountainhead is an unusual film, and it doesn't always stay inside the lines.
We begin and end in the mountains. Traam, the fictional social media platform that makes the world go round, has recently introduced new features that allows users to create and disseminate AI-generated, deepfake 'news' reports, the kind that might cause a riot or start a war.
It's all under control, says Traam CEO Venis 'Ven' Parish (Cory Michael Smith), but the rest of us know the truth.
Things are spiralling, governments are panicking, and Hugo 'Souper' Van Yalk (Jason Schwartzman) is starting to worry about his big weekend plans.
He's invited his filthy rich pals to stay at a swanky new pad in Utah he calls 'Mountainhead'. It's the kind of place that has a bowling alley in the basement, where everything is overpriced, but nothing ever works the way you want it to.
Souper picked the name as a sort of tribute to Ayn Rand's 1943 novel The Fountainhead – but really, he should have gone with something else.
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Ven is impressed. So, too, is Traam investor Randall Garrett (Steve Carell) and AI specialist Jeffrey 'Jeff' Abredazi (Ramy Youssef), who mocks Souper for his latest idea, a 'lifestyle super app' named Slowzo, which he hopes the other boys will pay for.
If they do, he'll make his first billion. If they don't, the lads will keep on calling him 'Soup Kitchen' (Armstrong deserves an extra star for that wickedly funny nickname).
Here's what we know: the world is on fire; Randall is terminally ill; Ven is single-handedly responsible for an impending global conflict; Jeff runs a company that could fix everything; and Souper is starting to believe the others when they tell him he should run for power in Argentina (don't ask).
When the US president starts calling, Randall and Ven allow themselves to imagine a new world under their leadership.
You wouldn't trust these men to run a bath, much less a planet in peril. But the 'Brewsters' believe their own hype. Except maybe Jeff, who's worried about what his girlfriend is up to on her holliers.
Where is all this going? And is there a lesson to be learned at all from Armstrong's intricate and, occasionally, impenetrable chamber piece? Maybe.
The relentless tech-bro babble will do your head in, and that's probably the point. Succession wasn't subtle, and neither is Mountainhead, a talky, operatic film where everything is a joke and nothing is left unsaid.
Tiresome? A bit. Frustrating? Sometimes. But the conversation changes so much that there's no time to be bored.
You won't always know what Ven and the other space cadets are talking about. Like other Armstrong shows, the trickier details take a while to settle – but it's fun to watch cranky, callous billionaires squirming and squabbling about matters that really shouldn't concern them.
Carell, meanwhile, is so good as the slippery elder statesman of the pack that you wonder if Armstrong should have built an entire series around him.
Who wouldn't want to watch a show about a terminally ill Steve Carell-shaped plutocrat with wacky ideas about how to prolong his life? This will do, for now.
Three stars
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