Grade: B
Watching Kinds of Kindness is like seeing 3 one-act plays performed by the same company of actors. However, the plays are in the early workshop stage – obviously not complete. Still being tinkered with based on audience feedback. If you think of it that way, like an evening at the theatre (rather than the theater), that is the best way to take in Kinds of Kindness. Focus on and appreciate the versatility of the actors, and not so much about how these are likely three half-baked ideas that could never quite go the distance into standalone feature-length territory.
The consensus seems to be that the first mini movie is the best, and it was my favorite of the three. It’s called “The Death of R.M.F.” – which is not as much of a spoiler as it sounds, once you realize that practically every character has those initials. Jesse Plemons plays Robert, whose boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe) has Robert’s life mapped out almost down to the minute. Every day, Robert receives a handwritten index card telling him exactly what time, when, and where to eat, sleep, shower, have sex with his wife (Hong Chau from The Menu, The Whale, and Showing Up), and sometimes the instructions get weird (“You’re going to get into a car accident at this intersection at 10:52pm tonight”). Robert, for the most part, doesn’t mind this life, and is very devoted to Raymond. We find out exactly why in a monologue Plemons delivers to Chau that gives us a Shyamalanian plot twist that makes you rethink everything. This chapter is the most intriguing, and does the best at giving us a full-fledged story with an arc, and a definitive period at the end. It’s the only one that I can picture being its own full movie. The cast list pops up on the screen for a minute, and then we move on to…
“R.M.F. is Flying.” Here, Plemons plays Daniel, a police officer. His wife Liz (Emma Stone) had been lost at sea for a while, but was recently found and returned home. Daniel is paranoid that this isn’t the real Liz, and is a clone of some kind. All of a sudden, she no longer resists chocolate, whereas she used to hate it. There are a couple of other, very subtle potential “clues.” For some reason, he asks Liz to do things that are increasingly more strange to prove it’s really her. I would just ask specific questions about our pasts that only she would know, but that’s not the route he goes. I kept waiting for some sort of Tarantinian link that connected these three stories, but they really have nothing to do with each other. However, in an anthology work like Kinds of Kindness, if you stew on it hard enough, you’re bound to find some parallels. In this one, Plemons delivers a lengthy speech to Hong Chau that rocks her world, and she’s in such disbelief, she barely or doesn’t say anything in response – just like in the previous episode. I think I understood this story’s ending, but it gets there in a peculiar and abrupt way.
The concluding story (“R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”) has Stone and Plemons as Emily and Andrew. They are traveling around in search of someone who can successfully raise the dead, which would give the two of them approval and special status in a fancy cult. Hong Chau and Willem Dafoe are the cult leaders, who live in a nice mansion. Between this chapter and the middle one, I don’t know which I liked less. This one (therefore the movie) ends quite randomly, but it sure is fun to see Stone dance. Apparently I missed a mid-credits scene which explains why this chapter is called what it is. Sounds like you don’t really need to see it. It’s otherwise not a great story already.
As hit-or-miss as each individual episode can be, I was absorbed, and didn’t check my watch until the last half hour of this 2 hour and 44 minute movie. I was excited that Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, and director Yorgos Lanthimos were working together again so soon after Poor Things – and I’d welcome more collaborations. You don’t often get to see an ensemble like this take on such different roles and see how they can stretch themselves. On that level, Kinds of Kindness is kind of a success.
Grade: B
Film Reviews by Mark 
Leave a reply to The Substance – Film Reviews by Mark Cancel reply