Last year, Adam McKay tried and failed to satirize the chaos and noise of our current political moment with his top-heavy, star-studded Netflix satire, Don’t Look Up. The film purported to take aim at ignorant American civilians, greedy politicians, and morally indifferent media figureheads. Instead, it earned the director some of the most scathing reviews of his career. McKay had almost certainly bitten off more than he could chew with Don’t Look Up: it’s a movie, after all, that makes a valiant attempt at addressing everything from climate change to millennial malaise to our current era of widely disseminated misinformation, somehow failing to hit any one of its targets.
There are a number of reasons why Don’t Look Up does not work. It’s not a particularly well-crafted movie. Its tonal shifts from lackluster, improv-heavy comedy to vague dramatic realism are erratic. Mark Rylance’s performance isn’t just misconceived – it’s also arguably offensive. The primary reason, though, that Don’t Look Up does not come together is that McKay is undeniably trying to speak to a lot of people with the movie – you do not get a cast like the one this film has and a distributor like Netflix at your whim if that’s not the case – and he’s somehow managing to talk down to all of them.
McKay’s other semi-dramatic experiments, The Big Short and Vicehave suffered from similar issues, though not to the same degree as Don’t Look Up. To be clear, McKay did not have this problem early in his career. Then, he was speaking to the masses, couching a blistering critique of our culture of gross male entitlement in a Trojan Horse of smart-dumb comedies that starred and were often co-written with his former creative partner, Will Ferrell. McKay’s early comedies are ultimately his most effective satires precisely because they speak to the most people. In doing so, these movies formulate meaningful commentary through the conduit of the comedy itself: truly, a language everyone can understand.
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, McKay’s breakthrough, was beloved in its time as a silly, frat-friendly boy’s lark, filled with imminently quotable catchphrases and uproariously surreal visual and verbal gags. Viewed today, the film is no less funny, but it carries an unmistakable sting in its depiction of a male-dominated workplace where the men in power are incompetent, entitled boors, and the one woman in the equation is regularly belittled or sexualized for merely daring to voice her opinions. Certainly, the antics of Burgundy and his buffoonish co-anchors don’t seem quite so cute in a post- # MeToo era, even if the film never goes for more than a few minutes without an ingenious comic bit.
Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobbywhich is, in this writer’s opinion, an even funnier and more inventive movie than Anchorman, casts McKay’s satirical concerns into the realm of politics. The story of a dim-witted, jingoistic racecar driver whose star run is threatened by a European interloper played by Sascha Baron Cohen, Talladega Nights takes a scalpel to our myth of American exceptionalism. The movie accomplishes this not through didactic screeds or throat-clearing speechifying, but via a barrage of absurd and inspired humor. After all, the “praying to baby Jesus” scene is almost unreasonably hilarious, but isn’t it also a reflection of the sort of narrow, myopic religious mania we’re seeing all too much of in the news today?
McKay’s fascination with male entitlement reached its zenith with Step Brothersone of the most bizarre and unforgettable studio comedies of the 2000s. Step Brotherson its cheery surface, lacks the topicality of something like Talladega Nights or even The Other Guys, which attempts to fold a plot about ponzi schemes and monstrous billionaires into a buddy-cop plot stuffed with McKay’s typical farcical non-sequiturs. Yet, Step Brothers is nothing less than a condemnation: of a culture of a bland suburban obedience, where adults let their psychotic grown children live with them indefinitely for fear they might one day have to enter the American work force. It is a dark, dark world that the movie depicts: one where the greatest nobility a man can aspire to involves making an appearance at the Catalina wine mixer.
McKay’s attempts at crafting commercial comedies with real satirical subtext petered out a bit after Step Brothers: The Other Guys pulls off the balancing act with less success, and the less said about Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which takes on bad-faith journalism and the American 24-hour news cycle, the better. It makes sense, then, that McKay would eventually pivot to more serious-minded material, as he did to much critical acclaim with The Big Short, his look at the 2007-2008 housing market crash. Even before he wrote and directed feature films, McKay was interested in comedy that spoke to social issues. As lighthearted as McKay’s Will Ferrell-starring George W. Bush sketches are when viewed today (McKay was a former head writer for Saturday Night Live), these skits carry the barely concealed spark of anger all the same.
To be clear, this is not an argument against McKay continuing to make damning cultural lampoons about the ways in which humanity has failed itself. The pessimism of McKay’s so-called serious films has only deepened since The Big Shortfrom the simmering ire of Vice to the very literal apocalypse of Don’t Look Up. Interestingly enough, a general look at the critical reactions to McKay’s last three features suggests that as his films have grown more despairing, the response to them has continued to sour. Again, this is not to suggest that McKay should simply lighten up and embrace the end of times or anything like that – it’s merely a statistic worthy of observation.
McKay’s most vocal critics often claim that he applies a sledgehammer approach to a genre that, much of the time, requires a lighter touch. There is also a growing sense that, as a filmmaker, he started to develop a bag of stylistic tricks – infographic sidebars, breaking the fourth wall, characters being introduced via snarky onscreen titles, a portrait of the American political landscape that is both appropriately cynical. and also not quite nuanced enough – that audiences are already starting to tire of. It would be smart of McKay to embrace a more intimate, perhaps even earnest approach in the next stage of his career, to not lapse into accidental self-parody.
None of this is in any way intended to disparage McKay as an artist, or to take anything away from his considerable accomplishments. The guy is a giant, a comedy icon, and he’s written and produced too many classics to re-list here. The truth is, though, that McKay used to make many of the same satirical points that he’s attempting to make in his later films when he simply chose to direct supposedly “dumb” studio fare. By engaging an audience in laughter and, in turn, lowering their defenses, McKay is also allowing viewers to absorb the messages held by even his most seemingly frivolous features. After all, it’s hard to laugh at a movie like Don’t Look Up when you get the sense that the filmmaker thinks he’s somehow superior to you.
Wherever McKay’s next act takes him, we’ll be there for it. Here’s to hoping he eases up on the infographic sidebars.