KINDS OF KINDNESS 😊

PREMISE

Three stories are told in a triptych-type fashion. A man seeks to break free from his predetermined path, a cop questions his wife’s demeanor after her return from a supposed drowning, and a woman searches for an extraordinary individual prophesied to become a renowned spiritual guide.

THE GOOD STUFF

JESSE PLEMONS- Plemons won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival this year for this, and I have to say it’s absolutely deserved in every way. He’s prominently featured in the first two stories, and he really holds it down in an amazing way. He plays three dramatically different characters both in personality and in physicality and it goes to show how much of a shapeshifter he can truly be when given the opportunity to be so.

THE 1ST STORY- I want to say one of the best performances of Jesse Plemons’s whole career is in the first chapter of this film. Not only is all of the story quirkiness that he’s always portrayed put to maximum use here, but this is the one excellent story of this film. This is like one of the best Black mirror episodes of all time that isn’t associated with that show. Fun performances all around, well-paced, I always like it when Willem Dafoe plays evil as well. What a strong start to this film.

EMMA STONE (IN THE 3RD STORY)- Stone gives this bite-size tour de force performance as a cult member desperate to find a Messianic kind of figure who can resurrect The dead. This is a 45-minute story and this character goes through a lot of heavy emotional bull**** in those 45 minutes. Stone is pretty incredible here. And she’s the only thing keeping this story from being in the bad category.

It’s performances such as this that make me really want to scream at people who say that she’s not one of the best in the game right now. Since that second Oscar win, people have really thrown the “overrated” title around when referencing Stone… And you guys look really nuts right now.

THE SCORE (THE GOOD STUFF)- On the one hand, I appreciate how the score kind of acts as a subliminal narrator for the story. Whenever ultra weird s*** happens, (and it happens quite a bit throughout this film) a music cue will play that completely embodies the weirdness of the moment, and the notes are never really the same. There’s always some new weird sound coming from some instrument, and in this regard the score is perfect.

THE BAD STUFF

THE SCORE (THE BAD STUFF)- On the other side of that coin, the soundtrack does the bad horror movie thing and lets the audience know that something’s going to happen to the point of robbing us of the element of surprise.

Whenever this score seems like it’s slowly building up to a crescendo note and stops completely, please understand that something provocative is about to happen. There is one exception to this that happens at the end of the second chapter. And I would have appreciated that a great deal if that moment of musical reservation wasn’t for such a f****** stupid scene.

THE UGLY STUFF

THE 2ND CHAPTER- And speaking of stupid things, the second chapter of this movie is no good in almost every possible way. If the first chapter was a really excellent episode of black mirror, this chapter serves as the blueprint to what a semi-decent episode would be just with all of the character motivations and justifications for character decisions thrown out of the window. The story in this chapter is nowhere near as well structured as the other two. Yes, Jesse P. is holding it down here, but who cares when the story is just so full of holes? This is also one of the rare times where Emma Stone is flat-out boring to watch in every single scene she’s in when it comes to the second story.

It’s bizarre how bad this is. My disgust knows no bounds for this second story.

(Word of advice: watch the first story, then when the second story starts just go and take a 45-minute dinner break or something, and come back when the third story begins and that is the optimum way to view this movie)

**************

Ultimately, I respect the fact that this was attempted, but I’m annoyed that this exists in the way it does.

I guess the main identifier of triptych storytelling is that there really isn’t supposed to be a conclusion at all the stories that you tell. It’s not really designed to be satisfying from what I understand. I really thought that that wasn’t going to bother me as much as it did, but it did. There is the idea of leaving your audience wanting more as a good thing….but that is an old way of thinking. It’s 2024. Audiences need resolutions. Whether it’s a happy resolution or a sad resolution, there needs to be punctuation at the end of your movie unless you’re building a cinematic universe around it. We can debate about whether a film director’s cinematic punctuation is good or not… but it needs to definitively be there.

This triptych story model bull**** is tailor-made for the artsy-fartsy, USC film School alumni level pretentious type film snobbery that should be vanquished from this Earth. It’s hot shot bull**** for the sake of being hot shot bull****. I can only imagine that there are film snobs out there who will watch this and act like it has some deeper meaning or some better artistic value simply because it’s an unconventional method of delivering the story. They are incorrect.

KINDS OF KINDNESS is in theaters now