Love the One You're With
Love the One You're With
Kinds of Kindness is the right kind of weird
“And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey
Love the one you’re with” —Stephen Stills
The funniest scene of the year, if not longer: A woman who was recently rescued from a maritime disaster that left several dead and may have involved cannibalism recounts a dream in which humans and dogs change places in society. The canines are fairly benevolent leaders, bandaging the humans’ wounds after licking them clean and even giving out chocolate on a regular basis while mostly saving the meat for themselves, which causes the humans to grow tired of the treats they subsist on and fight over the scraps of lamb given out each morning. Her takeaway from this strange vision? “It’s better to eat something that’s always available than to depend on something that runs out early every morning.”
That may be as close as Kinds of Kindness ever comes to a thesis statement, as Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest — a nearly three-hour triptych comprised of three thematically linked stories — is willfully bizarre in the manner of earlier works like Dogtooth and The Lobster. In other words, we’re so back. This a return to form after the comparatively normal The Favourite (which I loved) and Poor Things (which I did not), both of which also starred Emma Stone but were not co-written by Lanthimos’ longtime collaborator Efthimis Filippou. Kinds of Kindness is, and if there wasn’t a clear divide between those two segments of the Greek auteur’s filmography there certainly is now.
Joining Stone on the marquee are Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley, and Mamoudou Athie, all of whom appear as different characters in each chapter. This is Stone’s fourth collaboration with Lanthimos, and while she’s the headliner it’s Plemons who shines brightest. His trajectory has been deservedly incredible, with roles in everything from Game Night and The Power of the Dog to Civil War and Killers of the Flower Moon displaying his increasingly impressive range, and he’s at his best here. Comparisons to Philip Seymour Hoffman, once premature and seemingly based on looks, now feel entirely apt.
Through all the unrelenting oddity — like the husband who tells his wife to cut off a finger and cook it for him or the cult seeking out a prophesied figure who can bring the dead back to life — what emerges is a perplexing, at times touching meditation on what we do for the people we love. Whether these actions are born of devotion or coercion is almost beside the point, not least because the line between the two is sometimes so fine as to be indistinguishable. At times this comes close to romanticizing power dynamics that veer on abuse, but the film’s reality is heightened in a way that defuses such a literal interpretation. “They deserve each other” is usually an insult to both parties, but Kinds of Kindness echoes Phantom Thread in showing how such relationships remind us that it takes all kinds.