Flush the rich.
That’s the scatological thesis driving Triangle of Sadness, one that’s hammered home during a gastrointestinally challenging central set piece that takes place during an elaborate captain’s dinner on a luxury cruise. I’ll spare you the details (for reasons other than spoilers), but will say that the sequence is so bonkers and brazen—with merciless camerawork—that it’s the reason to see the movie, even if that advice goes against my gag reflex. Otherwise, Triangle of Sadness is a formless, obvious broadside against the upper percent, a bit too pleased with itself and pitiless.
Writer-director Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure) makes movies that could be considered deadpan Luis Buñuel. Certainly Triangle of Sadness recalls Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which centers on an affluent dinner party that never quite happens. And the movie’s final act, in which a collection of guests and employees from the yacht find themselves abandoned on an island, riffs on an earlier Buñuel film, 1956’s Death in the Garden, where refugees lost in a South American jungle try to recreate a posh society when they come across a crashed luxury plane. Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away also comes to mind, yet while Wertmüller was wild and Buñuel was wry, Triangle of Sadness—despite the madness of that dinner sequence—is too controlled. As meandering as the overall narrative is, each individual scene feels like it’s placing its characters into an inevitable vice.
Still, Harris Dickinson (Beach Rats) stands out as one half of a modeling/influencer couple who get a free ride on the yacht (his is the only performance with any genuine vulnerability in it), while Woody Harrelson’s brief stint as the ship’s captain brings a welcome element of unpredictability. Focusing on his cheshire-cat grin during that dinner was the only thing that helped me keep my own food down.
(10/26/2022)
