Ship of Fools

As satire Triangle of Sadness is sharp but the characters are a bit out of focus

[The Oscars are next Sunday and I’m on the home stretch of my annual review of the Best Picture nominees! So far I’ve done Everything Everywhere All At Once, Avatar: The Way of Water, All Quiet on the Western Front, Women Talking, Elvis, The Banshees of Inisherin, Tar, and now this:]

Unless you’re doing the malign-party-clown version in which I specialize, satire is a hard racket. Never mind getting the laughs (yeah, I know it’s not mandatory), the satirist also has to (well, ought to) get something lasting out of subject matter that seems utterly evanescent. You can’t satirize the verities, in fact they are your guiding light; you can only treat a contemporary absurdity or outrage as if it were a matter of universal and timeless importance. (Well, maybe not treat it that way exactly, because then you may hector… like I said, it’s tough.)

Triangle of Sadness, a luxury cruise disaster comedy, is my first Ruben Östlund movie, so I couldn’t say whether it’s his usual approach, but he does some very smart things to keep the story (to the extent that he does) from turning into dudgeon and dreck — which is a tough lift, because the foibles of the wealthy West that are his ultimate target sort of militate against subtlety.

First, though in the scale of things most of the principals are well-off, his main characters, Carl and Yaya, are a pair of social-media influencers — glamorous-looking young people who don’t have a lot of money but, because of their marketing value, get many free high-end treats, like the cruise on which most of the action takes place. So, like My Man Godfrey, they are wealth-adjacent, a good perspective from which to regard the rich. But unlike Godfrey they’re not clever, in fact they’re rather dim, so they’re not in on or above the gag — and they’re not in a position to tell you how to feel about the other characters and events in the film except inadvertently, which shows admirable dramatic restraint.

Östlund starts the movie with these two, in a long scene about Carl’s discontent with a bit of gamesmanship Yaya pulls at dinner in a swell restaurant, getting Carl to pick up the check. He questions her actions, which she at first denies, which makes him increasingly angry, which he at first expresses by niggling and then with ridiculous rage. It’s one of those minuscule things which become massive in relationships, and it’s interesting in its own right — though only mildly funny, also for admirable-restraint reasons; Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean, and Östlund, don’t milk the laughs the way any self-respecting Hollywood star might, and the truth of the playing makes them interesting, at least at this stage.

Eventually we find out more; Yaya shows self-awareness about her stunting (“I’m so good at being manipulative… I don’t even realize that I’m doing it”). Carl admires her honesty about that, but wants their whole relationship to be honest because he’s convinced they have a future together; Yaya, however, is is less interested in (or capable of) that than she is needful of a safe port after she’s done fooling with guys like Carl, and the certainty “that the person I’m with intends to take care of me.” She expects to be some rich man’s trophy wife. “We’ll see,” says Carl. “I’ll make you love me.”

I’m spending a lot on time on this first section because though the movie gets extremely broad, it’s framed by this relationship and seems at first to be about it. But their relationship isn’t what gets the attention — if you’ve heard anything about Triangle of Sadness you’ve probably heard about the disastrous cruise at the center of it, an uproarious set-piece that by itself is a crude but effective cavalcade of cluelessness by the super-rich passengers, and when that ensues Carl and Yaya, on board as another influencer perk, take a lower profile as the ensemble revs up and Östlund sets the restrained approach to one side. This is both a pleasure and a problem.

The figures of fun range from stately old Winston and Clementine, who announce themselves “from Great Britain” and made their pile on war armaments (they complain about the United Nations, whose anti-land-mine regulations “trimmed 25% of our profit”); completely socially maladroit computer nerd Jarmo, so grateful for the slightest female attention he’s willing to reward it with Rolexes; the crude Russian fertilizer tycoon, self-styled “King of Shit” Dimitry; his wife, who prefers champagne to water even when she’s nauseous and whose idle fantasy that the staff follow their bliss (“I command you, enjoy the moment!”) leads to a mass forced water-sliding; and the Captain, who refuses to come out of his cabin despite repeated pained entreaties by the head steward, until circumstances make avoidance impossible, at which point he turns out to be Woody Harrelson, which as always is where the party really begins.

Now, from that description — and from the now-famous storm during the Captain’s Dinner, a general explosion of shit and puke — you might get the impression that we’re in Lindsay Anderson/ Marco Ferreri territory, with all the allegorical stops out and subtleties be damned. And for the moment we are, and to be frank I rather enjoyed the mass comeuppance, and even the rhetorical centerpiece of the socialist Captain and hyper-capitalism Dimitry getting drunk in the communications room and arguing agreeably over the intercom system as the debacle ensues.

But this cataclysm, while purgative, isn’t the end of the story. When the shit literally and figuratively comes down, we wind up with the surviving characters on an apparently uninhabited island where the trappings of wealth and structures of capital disappear — that is, to the extent they are not carried in the characters’ consciousnesses. (Small spoilers now.) In the absolute wilderness “toilet manager” Abigail — one of the Filipino staff we had seen earlier scrubbing decks and checking phones at break time — arrives in a covered lifeboat with bottled water, pretzel sticks, and skills the others lack, such as fishing and fire-building, and thus quickly becomes the ruler of the group. From her power position Abigail makes demands and bargains, including with Carl, and a scene between them in the lifeboat makes for an eerie callback to Carl and Yaya’s opening conversation about honesty and trophy wives:

ABIGAIL: Do you remember what you said the first night you were here? What did you say?
CARL: “I love you, you give me fish.”
ABIGAIL: Exactly. And so you know why that is so beautiful? Like you?
CARL: No. Why?
ABIGAIL: Because it’s the truth.

This is canny and appropriate to the satiric theme of the story — which, unless I miss my guess, has to do with power dynamics and how we strive to deny they exist or apply to us until we are forced into it. The only problem, if you find it one, is that Carl and Yaya turn out to be less interesting that they first seemed — as does every other character (excepting Abigail, mostly because she’s new). After all the mayhem, any interest we may have in their relationship is academic. Literature is full of stories about lovers challenged the way Carl and Yaya have been challenged — star-crossed, as it were — that keep us desperately interested to the end, but Carl and Yaya are more like Candide and Cunegonde — idiots on a march of folly. I don’t mind; that’s pretty much how I see things, too. But someone else might feel themselves, or those other characters, to have been cheated.

At least Östlund lets the actors invest their characters with shadings; Henrik Dorsin as the maladroit Jarmo, for example, is funny but also poignant, full of goodwill but terrified even to get out of his seat to dance with Yaya. Dolly DeLeon puts on a nice little show of Abigail figuring out that she doesn’t have to be a servant anymore and then making everyone else figure it out, too. Harrelson is a pisser — I’m not sure whether the guy’s an unacknowledged genius or he just never takes a part that he isn’t destined to absolutely eat. When he’s pried out of his cabin to do the Captain’s Dinner and work the ogres in the receiving line, the increasing necessity of each drink he takes is a comedy class in itself.