The follow -up of “succession” is an intimidating feat – so much so that it is better to think of the HBO film “Mountainhehead” as more than one palace cleaner than a next act. Written and produced by the creator of “succession” Jesse Armstrong, “Mountainhehead” can share an environment (ultra-rich) and a comic rhythm (fast, verbose, profane) with the sumptuously acclaimed drama, but it is much less ambitious by design. Armstrong wrote the script in a few weeks, and most of the action is confined, at stake, in retirement Alpine Homonym. As if to send a message to the public, “Mountainhead” even takes this least prestigious film: the film made for television, broadcast on the last day of the Emmy’s eligibility window of this year – like a student handing over his homework directly to the deadline.
If we receive this message and defines the expectations accordingly, then “Mountainhead” has a lot to offer. Yes, its 109 minutes can be a way for Armstrong to exorcise the latest traces of “succession” of its system. (The pillars of “succession” Mark Mylod, Will Tracy, Lucy Prebble and others are all credited as executive producers.) But “Mountainhead” has its own objective: the destructive impact of technology and the child men who control it, as if the Roys of the “succession” were replaced by a quartet of Lukas Matsons. The self -taught entrepreneur of Alexander Skarsgård was widely used in contrast to the inherited and not deserved wealth of adult children; In “Mountainhead”, the work itself occupies the front of the stage, even if its consequences are out of sight and out of the mind for its characters.
“Mountainhead” poses the existence of a kind of billionaire fraternity called the brewers, who went down to UTAH for their semi-Regular poker evening. On the eve of this brother Hang, Venis (Cory Michael Smith, of “Saturday Night” and “May December”), Zuckerberg CEO of the Social Media Traam society, launched a new functionality in depth contribution which lit a global joy of disinformation. Venis joking by saying that he should answer by publishing “Fuuck”, with two U; Its hangers laughs sycophantically, even if the new functionality stokes sectarian violence by eroding the ability of users to tell False.
Jeff (Ramy Youssef) is the inventor of an AI technology which represents “The Cure for Info-Cancer” in Traam “4Chan on Farehin ‘acid”. (The details here are at best misty; it is symbolism that is important.) But even if Jeff is the Brewster most overwhelmed by a conscience, it is always less concerned with the ethical surpassing of Venis than its Jeff shade for a lack of “founding energy” on a high -end podcast. Closer to home, the billions of Jeff cannot buy the loyalty of his girlfriend Hester (Hadley Robinson), who took off for a rally adjacent to the orgy in Mexico. “Just because people have sex at a party that it’s a sex festival,” does not really realize it. The financier Randall (Steve Carell), which is denying its prognosis for terminal cancer, is completing the quartet, which welcomes Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), which is known as supper, as in Sou Kitchen – because its relatively small figure with the poorest billionaire. ”
You may have already taken up some echoes in the previous paragraphs of the synopsis. Supper self-extra-rate imitates Tom Wambbsgans evaluation of a fortune of $ 5 million as “the poorest person in America” and “the largest dwarf in the world”; The jealousy of Jeff de Hester remembers Connor Roy’s (successful) attempts to buy the loyalty of his paid expansion that has become Willa. Comparisons with “succession” can be inevitable only a few years after its final, but “Mountainhead” also wins them.
But “Mountainhead” looks outward as well as back. I will admit I have screened the film shortly after having finished “Careless People”, the former executive of Facebook Sarah Wynn-Williams Tell-All on the interior functioning of this company in the 2010s. The total indifference of Venis towards the chaos he caused, and his repudiation of responsibility, is completely in line with the way Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg At the potential moments of the JESUS as the 2016 elections or the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Likewise, Randall’s obsession to go “post-human” to live eternity in cyberspace comes from the same denial of death which leads personalities like Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson to seek extreme means, often macabre to prolong their lives. Money can buy so much; Why not immortality?
In other words, I am constrained by the analysis by Armstrong of the broken psychology of ratherocrats, in particular when their wealth comes from “disturbance” and “innovation”. I am less obliged by the idea that these people are capable of intimate friendship – and even less than they would be friends with each other. It is fun to see these men engage in homosocial rituals as to scribble their net value on their bare chests; There is even a ceremony for when a Brewster exceeds the other in the mere metric which seems to have importance for them. For the same reasons, it is also unconvincing when they care to worry about each other. Armstrong needed a reason to put these people in the same room, but a sincere affection is not plausible.
As a film rather than a series, “Mountainhead” does not have time to cultivate the psychological nuance or the interpersonal dynamics which made the Roys so indelible. (This partly explains the much more established distribution, which enters with Gravitas rather than slowly building their roles in a business card.) Instead, “Mountainhead” goes all on the farce, leading Caleness of Venis, the objections of Jeff, Hugo’s insecurity and Randall’s despair in their inevitable point of combustion. Of the four, Randall gets closest to a kind of pathos with his frantic denial of the inevitable, but when he calls a “solid start -up planet” as a casual start -up planet, it is the Muskian grandiosity that carries the comic load.
Armstrong seems to intud the inherent forces (speed, concentration) and the weaknesses (emotion, depth) of its current medium. The ambition of “mountain” is much lower than diagnosing the underlying dysfunction of the privileged few who direct the world, contenting themselves with putting their dysfunction on a hilarious hilarious hilarious display. But with biting references to moral philosophy, “Ayn Bland” and, in a particularly dark moment, Jamal Khashoggi, “Mountainhead” has clarity and erudition to reach its narrower target.
“Mountainhead” is currently streaming on Max and will be broadcast on HBO on May 31 at 8 p.m..
