12 hours ago
‘Mountainhead' review: Plutocrats in party mode
Which is the scariest episode of Succession?
If you've watched the HBO sensation — created by British satirist Jesse Armstrong and streaming in India on JioHotstar — you're bound to have a few nominees. It may be the one where a media baron forces his employees to humiliate themselves with a game called 'Boar On The Floor,' the one where a wife spells out to her husband just how surely she doesn't love him, the one where a son desperately wants to confess a crime to his mother, to which she tells him they'll do it over eggs in the morning — only to ghost him come breakfast. Armstrong created awful (and awfully compelling) characters, and they've left scars.
For me, the most chilling episode remains 'Whatever It Takes' (season 3, episode 6) where a media magnate and his family are encamped in a Republican retreat and, in hotel rooms and bathrooms, casually vet and select America's next President. At a time oligarchs appear to be running countries with more certainty than elected leaders, this episode cuts deep, focussing on personal pettiness and whimsy and the impossible imbalance of power. It felt frighteningly plausible.
Armstrong riffs again on men who control the world — who control all our worlds, to be precise — in his debut film Mountainhead, out now on JioHotstar. Four tech moguls, who scrawl their net-worths on their chests, have gathered for an off-the-grid weekend of playing poker and roasting each other, except they can't really fall off the grid because the world happens to be burning. (This only makes the roasting hotter.)
Cory Michael Smith plays Venis Parish, the biggest fish of the four, worth $220 billion and heading a social media network that — because of newly launched AI tools — is spreading so much misinformation so efficiently that reactionary violence is breaking out around the world. As they scroll past horrifying videos on their feeds, Venis convinces himself that the videos look too realistic to be real. 'Do you believe in other people?", he asks Randall, the eldest of the group, who assuages his (momentary) concern. (This, again, is straight out of Succession, where the party line for customers dying on cruise-ships involved the savage acronym NRPI: 'No real person involved.")
Randall Garrett is played by Steve Carrell, who has a terminal disease but literally refuses to die. 'Incorrect," he snaps at a doctor's diagnosis, instead goading Parish to create a post-human world where Garrett's own consciousness can be uploaded to something — anything — that may live on. It's a terrific character, perpetually sinister and self-serving, hiding his own motives behind Hegel and Kant.
Jeff Abredazi, an AI superstar whose net worth is growing by the minute, calls Randall 'Papa Bear" and confides in him. Jeff, played by Ramy Youssef, appears to have a fix to what's ailing the world, a filter that can tell truth from fiction and immediately extinguish the violence — but this would require him to join forces with Venis. This is a slippery conundrum, because while Jeff seems to be the only one affected by the outbreaks of violence, no greater good compels him to shake hands with Venis. Morality, it is apparent, gets fuzzier and fuzzier in rarefied air.
The host of the weekend is Hugo Van Yalk, nicknamed Soupy. While this is tweaked to 'Souperman' from time to time, it stands for 'Soup Kitchen' since he is the only non-billionaire of the bunch. Played by Jason Schwarzman, Soupy has built the high-altitude home that gives the film its title — while all the others decry its ugliness. Schwarzman soaks the character in such unctuousness that he makes it evident that while the others are finished products, he hopes that he is merely a billionaire-in-waiting, a trial version that will make it big someday. A beta.
The performances are great across the board. Smith is absolutely unhinged, picking fights with trees and annoyed by the President putting him on hold. Youssef is visibly grappling with newfound power while trying to be a part of a quartet — however misguided said quartet may be. Carrell is, unsurprisingly, the pick of the bunch, entitled and petty and deeply amoral. As the film moves from deluded-tycoon territory to wilder and more bizarre shenanigans, it is he who grounds the madness and makes it feel scarily real.
One of my top Carrell physical comedy bits is in the 2006 film Little Miss Sunshine when he, as an affectionate uncle, runs towards automatic doors with arms by his side and hands winged up, willing it to open faster so he can run in. It's spectacular. In Mountainhead, his character is so blinded by desperation and envy that he walks straight into a glass door.
Mountainhead is a highly entertaining and characteristically quotable film from Armstrong, but Succession loyalists have seen these themes before, while tech-bros like Peter Thiel and the Paypal mafia have been lampooned far more effectively in Mike Judge's prescient Silicon Valley. There are times when this film begins to resemble the sublime The Death Of Stalin (Amazon Prime, directed by Armstrong's former collaborator Armando Iannucci) but when four tech-bros stand in front of a RISK board-game and start divvying up the world, it feels clumsily literal.
Then again, keeping it literal may be the plan. Mountainhead's significance lies in its urgent timeliness, with world leaders on the payroll of big businessmen, and AI developing quicker than humanity can handle. How much do we know? The film starts by showing horrible violence in Gujarat and ends with a CNN headline where the Indian 'government says order has been restored across most of the country." In this increasingly post-fact world, what can we believe? Who will fact-check the fact-checkers?
Streaming Tip Of The Week
The documentary The Social Dilemma (Netflix) is five years old — which feels like an eternity given the way technology and social behaviour is evolving — but the film remains thought-provoking and essential.
