Mountainhead

 

This review may contain spoilers!

Mountainhead is almost a one-room drama of sorts involving four billionaires as they vent about their business woes, the disruptive consequences of their own A.I., and the idea of taking over world nations and crafting the perfect murder.

This movie is an interesting take on satirising modern billionaires and the power they wield. While I felt a lot of this movie lacked a decent narrative throughline, the presentation of the message was clear and decent enough. These characters are all very callous, none of them come near to being grounded and one even acts like 'other people' don't really exist. These characters release products into the world that have a global negative impact, and don't assess how to fix it but instead attempt to find humour in the situation. Everything is about reputation and how to get an edge over others to enhance their financial profiles. One character takes a sociopathic bend because he becomes convinced he needs to kill one of the others so that his consciousness can be uploaded digitally when the science progresses there. This seemingly convoluted fear of mortality turns into a crazy plot where three of the characters attempt the most ineffectual murder in history. This film does a lot of this, the characters talking about doing these big serious sweeping things and not really advancing towards an actual outcome. A light barb that billionaires are morally bankrupt and also only looking to make effectual change for themselves.

Jesse Armstrong has a pretty crisp visual style, with the camera keeping things active and interesting in spite of the singular location. I loved how dynamic the lighting was and how the camera sought every possible interesting angle of interaction. The score by Nicholas Britell is quite a delicate, almost trance-like sound that is virtually crystalline and perfect in sharp contrast to the characters at the core of this story.

Steve Carell, who played Randall, is a more sociopathic and emotionally devoid role; Carell's character is probably the most cutthroat in his willingness to betray others to preserve himself. Cory Michael Smith, who played Venis, looks to be having incredible fun playing the clear Elon Musk parody; this is a character who runs through some very extreme turns of emotion that happen at very surprising points in the script. Ramy Youssef, who played Jeff, is very intriguing as the more morally conscious member of the group; Youssef's character incites the most conflict which makes him fun to watch.

However, the best performance came from Jason Schwartzman, who played Souper. This is a character who is a simpering hanger-on to the big billionaires at the table. Schwartzman's role isn't a billionaire, the only one at Mountainhead with a net worth only in the millions. He walks around desperate for the approval of the other three, wanting to be seen as something close to an equal. The initial grovelling is embarrassing in the face of unabashed confidence or indifference, yet Schwartzman doubles down further and further. When he gets so desperate that he becomes the active pawn in a murder plot, we see how wretched and shallow this character truly is in the face of his ambition. He barely contains his glee at rolling over a rival to be held in better esteem by the end of the film. None of these characters is likeable, but Schwartzman's role certainly has the most interesting dimensions to it.

I really struggled to find the plot in Mountainhead. The story is really these four band together, talk some ideas but act impotently about them and then turn on one another for the sake of greed. It's a pretty shallow satire at best, depicting familiar celebrity billionaires via dramatic parody but without anything deep to say beyond what one might expect criticism of billionaires to look like on a surface level. The fact the comedic murder attempt story is as close as this film gets to a linear narrative is underwhelming. It's clearly a movie that thinks it has more to say than it really does, but the points aren't really these big intellectual discussion topics. This is a film that feels more like a corridor debate between university students than something helmed by an Emmy-winning creator.

The editing for Mountainhead is slow, no doubt owing to the limited ability to cut within a singular location. Unfortunately, it still contributes to a more sluggish presentation of the story.

More of a college philosophy bro's character assassination of a pack of billionaires than a groundbreaking satire. I would give Mountainhead a 6/10.