Scene Steal­ers: Din­ner at the end of the world in Don’t Look Up

I’m going to be hon­est with you. There was a point about halfway through Adam McKay’s Best Pic­ture-nom­i­nat­ed Don’t Look Up where I took a brief pause to ask myself the ques­tion: is this the worst film I’ve ever seen in my entire life? Because the job of being a crit­ic is about ask­ing your­self these tough ques­tions not just after the film, but while we ​“wit­ness” it in front of our eyes.

For me, the act of watch­ing Don’t Look Up was akin to sur­vey­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly gris­ly motor wreck­age. There’s a cliché that comes up a lot in crit­i­cism where a writer might employ the term ​“car-crash cin­e­ma” as a descrip­tor. For me, this was more like a car crash that had been caused by anoth­er car crash, and then a plane had mys­te­ri­ous­ly dive-bombed onto the flam­ing wreck­age, ensur­ing wide­spread and painful death for all involved. Which is strange­ly apt con­sid­er­ing the film’s sub­ject matter.

My favourite scene in Don’t Look Up occurs in its cli­mac­tic five min­utes, and to extend the pre­vi­ous metaphor a lit­tle fur­ther, it’s like the first para­medic on the scene who, against all odds, man­ages to find signs of life in a lone, blood-flecked crash vic­tim. For con­text, McKay’s film employs a brand of ultra-sneer­ing design­er cyn­i­cism to offer a spin on the clas­sic dis­as­ter movie tem­plate where the preser­va­tion of the glob­al pop­u­lous plays sec­ond fid­dle to the aus­pices of cap­i­tal­ism, media rat­ings and polit­i­cal point-scor­ing. It’s basi­cal­ly a galaxy-brain take on the may­or from Jaws.

A career-worst Jen­nifer Lawrence plays a per­ma-dis­tressed sci­en­tist (uncon­vinc­ing­ly) who dis­cov­ers a comet whose flight tra­jec­to­ry hap­pens to end with it smack­ing into Earth and trig­ger­ing an extinc­tion-lev­el event. A yap­ping, career-worst Leonar­do DiCaprio is her supe­ri­or who decides to accom­pa­ny her on a jour­ney through the fetid tor­ture dun­geon that is Cap­i­tal Hill to inform the cur­rent incum­bents (career-worsts from Meryl Streep and Jon­ah Hill) who are broad pas­tich­es of the recent real-life com­man­ders in chief. Fish, meet barrel.

There is prob­a­bly a Dooms­day Book-length piece to be writ­ten tab­u­lat­ing all the awful things in this film, but that is some­body else’s toil. For today we are here in the name of cel­e­bra­tion, because the inner sanc­tums of the Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing estab­lish­ment have, for rea­sons beyond the com­pre­hen­sion of your hum­ble scribe, deemed this one of the year’s crown­ing achieve­ments in cin­e­mat­ic art. We spec­u­late that its inclu­sion is large­ly down to its trite plea to avert a cli­mate dis­as­ter, a plea we might add that has all the depth and nuance of the type of per­for­ma­tive celebri­ty Insta­gram post it takes great pains to decry. But let’s get back to that one good scene…

In the end, when [spoil­er] the unchecked greed of the polit­i­cal elites – stoked by key actors from Sil­i­con Val­ley, as rep­re­sent­ed by a career-worst Mark Rylance – has result­ed in cat­a­stro­phe, Leo, Jen and sundry sup­port­ing play­ers come togeth­er to have one final Thanks­giv­ing meal where they fond­ly rem­i­nisce about the small plea­sures of life on Earth. A moment of hum­ble sin­cer­i­ty punc­tures all the grat­ing mis­an­thropy that has come before, as these char­ac­ters drift off into the infi­nite at rel­a­tive ease with their sor­ry predicament.

A career-best Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met is among the din­ers, a lank-haired skater boi who also hap­pens to be a devout Chris­t­ian. He intones a prayer and reminds his End of Days con­gre­ga­tion of the con­so­la­tions of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty in a world that seems ever-more god­less, espe­cial­ly with film­mak­ers like Adam McK­ay giv­en cre­ative carte blanche (just make anoth­er Step Broth­ers fer­chrisakes!). To restate, the work Cha­la­met does here is exem­plary – the only actor in the film who seems to con­nect with the film’s wacky com­ic register.

This short sequence shows what the direc­tor can achieve if he takes off his court jester out­fit and decides to play the hum­ble sage, even for just a sec­ond. In a film about the dif­fi­cul­ty of remem­ber­ing the small things that make life worth liv­ing, this is the small moment that works to claw back a few incre­ments of good faith in an oth­er­wise unsal­vage­able mon­stros­i­ty. Some­times, even when we feel we’ve hit rock bot­tom, human­i­ty always has the poten­tial for hushed self-reflec­tion and can – when the sit­u­a­tion demands it – pull some­thing out of the bag to make life (and movie watch­ing) feel a lit­tle less like a mean­ing­less night­mare of suffering.