"Triangle of Sadness" and "All Quiet on the Western Front"

Let's get this over with.

Ruben Östlund loves to examine the absurdities and hypocrisies of modern man, with the pretensions of the upper classes being a special target.  "Triangle of Sadness" is his most unsubtle film, about a boatload of rich elites on a doomed cruise, and the hapless crew trying to keep them happy.  Our main POV characters are Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickinson), a young influencer couple who are always bickering over money.  The captain (Woody Harrelson), is perpetually drunk and won't leave his cabin.  The cruise director, Paula (Vicki Berlin), is a perfectionist who won't turn down any request from a guest, no matter how inane.  Add a passel of rich morons for passengers, some bad weather, and watch the vomit fly.  

The trouble with "Triangle of Sadness" is that it's actually two different films.  I didn't mind the first half, which is cartoonish and full of cringe humor.  It features a lot of physical comedy paired  with dark, dark social commentary.  There's an amazing set piece where a fancy dinner takes place during a terrible storm, resulting in epic amounts of seasickness and wasted food.  However, the second half of the film is  more earnest, about what happens when the established hierarchy is disrupted by disaster.  Suddenly a cleaning lady, Abigail (Dolly de Leon), emerges as the person with the most power, because she's the only one with any survival skills.  And once she has power, does she handle it any better than the spoiled elites?  

The amount of contempt that Östlund has for his characters turned me off of the film.  Every single person is a caricature, the elderly and the infirm are often treated as grotesques, and no one has any kind of psychological depth.  I might have been more receptive to Östlund's aims if there weren't so much recent media about the absurdity of the class divide, like "White Lotus" and "The Menu."  "Triangle of Sadness" is so obvious in its aims and so mean-spirited, I quickly lost patience with it.  As a comedy, it has some good instincts and gets in a few good punchlines.  As satire, however, it's entirely too blunt to have much impact.  

On to "All Quiet on the Western Front," Edward Berger's adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's novel.  It's the first proper German adaptation of the WWI epic, and takes its cues from more recent war films like 1917 - which you can easily imagine playing out in the same universe as this one.  We follow a group of German students near the end of WWI who become soldiers and go off to war.  These include 17-year-old Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) and his friends Albert (Aaron Hilmer), Ludwig (Adrian Grunewald) and Franz (Moritz Klaus).  There's been some dismay from fans of the novel that the film version takes great liberties with the sequence of events, including changing the iconic ending.  However, the themes of the film remain intact - the boys' loss of innocence, and the terrible contrast between their dreams of glory and the harsh reality of warfare.

And the harsh reality of warfare is really the main event.  For most of the 147 minute running time, we're treated to ghastly visions of combat and its aftermath.  Our young protagonists are subjected to an endless parade of horrors, climaxing with Paul's ugly showdown with an enemy soldier in a muddy crater.  Occasionally some respite is offered by interludes with a German official, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Bruhl), who is trying to negotiate an armistice to end the fighting.  However, these are designed to elicit more rage, as the German command is completely unsympathetic to the plight of their own soldiers, and are more worried over trivialities and creature comforts.  

The film's production is impressive, and the material is certainly compelling.  However, this is a difficult film to watch.  The actors do their best, but the characters are uniformly flat and uninspiring.  The imagery is beautifully realized, and the anti-war messages come across loud and clear in a way that other WWII films don't consistently manage to get right.  However, the pacing drags, and the film is far too long.  Though I'm happy that it exists, and I appreciate its aims, I was very relieved when "All Quiet on the Western Front" was over.      

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