Kinds of Kindness

I can’t help but admire Greek raconteur Yorgos Lanthimos for following up his most successfully mainstream movie, “Poor Things” (11 Oscar nominations, four wins), with a two-hour-and-forty-four-minute poisoned pie to the face. When you’re given carte blanche, go for it. And so, he does, even if in a way, he does not, pulling back from the fantastical version of the 19th century in “Poor Things” to set “Kinds of Kindness” in the mundane modern world, eschewing so much visual opulence for something more straight-forward and much more severe. It’s the world as we know it, or more precisely, as we see it, and which renders its emergent weirdness and wildness that much more profound. That’s about as far as the profundity goes, however. That’s not to suggest “Kinds of Kindness” isn’t entertaining. It frequently is, if morbidly so; I laughed a lot! But it’s also frustratingly shallow, and a little bit endless, like a Lanthimos version of “The Kentucky Fried Movie” recalibrated as a grim epic. Your mileage may vary.

A cinematic triptych, each one featuring the same stable of actors, “Kinds of Kindness” tells three stories, the first about a timid man (Jesse Plemons) whose boss (Willem Dafoe) functions as a kind of godlike life coach, the second involving the wife (Emma Stone) of Daniel (Plemons) returning after being lost at sea though he suspects she’s not really his wife, giving her increasingly bizarre and gruesome orders to test his theory, and the third finding Emily (Stone) torn between the sex cult to which she belongs and her past family life. What we have there, then, are three variations on the theme of control though rather than explore those themes in any substantial way, Lanthimos is content to merely exhibit them. That’s fine, in so far as the blackly comic humor goes, and it does go pretty far, so far that I was never bored, exactly, even as the whole thing begins to feel like the insistent piano chord, one bleating note, over and over, culminating in a sort of shaggy dog joke that wears the whole enterprise’s ultimate meaningless like a badge of honor.

If “Kinds of Kindness” is salvaged beyond its moments of humor, it is through the performances, even if they are hemmed in by lack of dimension. In his two leading roles, Plemons demonstrates a melancholy unique to each character, while Stone’s turn is impressive for its physicality, her constant forward motion and curt speaking voice getting across some sort of internal conflict that the movie itself is as never as interested in, virtually matching the purple Dodge Challenger she rolls around in. That Challenger is there mainly to set up the concluding shaggy dog joke, but I just kind of wished Emily, nay, Emma had kept pedal to metal. Lanthimos has unquestionably helped Stone grow as an actor, even if “Kinds of Kindness” suggests it might be time for her to chart a course to a new horizon.