| An adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 allegorical novel High-Rise had long been an unfulfilled passion project for British producer Jeremy Thomas. He first purchased the rights to the novel in the late 1970s and tried to set it up with maverick director Nicolas Roeg (with whom he eventually worked on the 1980 erotic thriller Bad Timing). For various reasons (including the contention by many that the novel was “unfilmable”), Thomas was never able to get the project off the ground, although he managed to work over the ensuing decades with a laundry list of notable international directors, including Nagisa Oshima (1983’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence), Bernardo Bertolucci (1987’s The Last Emperor, among others), Terry Gilliam (2005’s Tideland and the forthcoming The Man Who Killed Don Quixote), and David Cronenberg (1996’s Crash, also based on a supposedly “unfilmable” Ballard novel). There is usually good reason for why filmmakers’ passion projects take decades to get made, and High-Rise is no exception. Like the novel, the film is a heavy social allegory in the vein of William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, but unlike that book and its various film adaptations, it lacks a persuasive reason for the narrative descent into savagery. Most of the story takes place within a luxury high-rise apartment building on the outskirts of London, one of five such buildings designed by famed architect Anthony Royal (Jeremy Irons), who lives in a lavish penthouse on the top floor. The building is a bit like an inverted L, with the top dozen or so floors jutting outward above the ones below it, which gives the building a unwieldy, top-weighted appearance that fits in all too nicely with metaphorical implications about power being hoarded at the top levels of society. However, like many locations in Ballard’s novels, this building appears to exist independently of the work-a-day world, making it a kind of isolated laboratory in which the characters can act out our collective psychological dysfunction until the raging, bitter end (it is also located out of time, as all the cars appear to be from the 1970s and no one has modern technology like cellphones, but there are no overt references to any particular timeframe). That the end is neigh is inherent in the fact that the building is, purposefully or otherwise, socially stratified, with the middle-class tenants on the lower floors while the wealthier people live above them. There is also a strange family dynamic at play, with the lower-class denizens having children while the wealthy and powerful are all childless, which makes them even more intolerant of the lower tenants and their inescapably messy lives (one of the tipping points in the film is when a children’s birthday party invades the building’s indoor pool, displacing all the wealthy adults who were lounging there). The protagonist a Dr. Robert Laing, a physiologist who has recently moved into an apartment on the 25th floor. Recently divorced, Laing is a kind of in-between character who has one foot in each of the building’s class-constrained strata, although Hiddleston plays him as an incessant bore (there are no signs whatsoever that this is the same actor who chewed the Marvel scenery as the villainous Loki). Laing develops a relationship with both Charlotte (Sienna Miller), the free-wheeling single mother who lives above him, and Richard Wilder (Luke Evans), a documentary filmmaker who lives on the lower floors and has been cheating on his wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss) with Charlotte—that is, until Laing and Charlotte become sexually involved. Laing also becomes wary friends with Royal, although their relationship feels like little more than a narrative convenience to justify Royal confiding secrets about the building and its tenants to the audience surrogate. After a series of petty grievances among tenants is inflamed by various technical malfunctions and power outages in the building, there is a quick descent into tribal savagery, with the previously civilized tenants reverting to a primal, uninhibited existence that is characterized by both violent skirmishes among various groups and random orgiastic sex (an early scene showing Dr. Lang dissecting a human head by slicing the scalp and literally peeling the face off feels like a literal-minded reminder of how, despite our fancy exteriors, we’re all just primitive meat on the inside). Not having read the novel, I can’t comment on how well Ballard explains or justifies not only his characters’ shedding of civilization, but also their apparent refusal to simply leave the building after it decays into violent anarchy, but screenwriter Amy Hunt and director Ben Wheatley (Kill List) make no effort whatsoever to explain any of it, perhaps assuming that the film’s allegorical importance will trump any questions we might have pertaining to narrative logic or believable character behavior. Part of the problem is that the characters feel like cartoons, but have just enough psychological realism to keep their inexplicable behavior frustrating, rather than intriguing (it is as if the film wants to dabble in, but not fully commit to, the kind of absurdist surrealism that fueled Luis Buñuel’s thematically similar 1962 film The Exterminating Angel). We also know from the outset where we’re headed, as we are introduced to Laing in blood-spattered clothing roasting a dog’s leg amid the ruins of what was clearly a once fashionable modernist bachelor pad, so there isn’t really much shock or surprise when everything comes crashing down. On a purely theoretical level, there are some interesting things to be said about class antagonism, technological dependence, and the fine balance between civilization and savagery, but everything in High-Rise is done with such sledgehammer obviousness that it goes down like molten rock. Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Magnolia Pictures |
Overall Rating: (2)
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