John C Reilly Week Day Four: The Lobster

I said earlier in this special week of columns how bizarre Step Brothers was.

That movie had nothing on The Lobster.

The John C. Reilly Factor

The Lobster is set in a distopian world where living alone is, shall we say, strongly discouraged.  Single people of a certain age are tracked down and sent by the City to the Hotel where they are given 45 days to find a partner or else be turned into an animal most likely of their choice.  The movie opens with Colin Farrell going voluntarily to the Hotel with a dog.  The dog is his brother.  Farrell’s unseen wife has just left him for another man, someone who, like Farrell, is short-sighted.  The setting seems to suggest that superficial similarities are all that relationships are built on.  Every character speaks in a rather matter-of-fact monotone throughout the film, suggesting further alienation from legitimate human feelings.  And it is possible to earn additional time at the Hotel provided you manage to hunt down and tranquilize fleeing singles living out in the Woods.

The film’s title comes from Farrell’s choice of what he would be changed to in the event he can’t find someone.  His reasoning is he’s a good swimmer that likes the sea and lobsters live to be 100 years old.

Reilly’s role is a small one, as another “guest” at the Hotel.  He has a lisp.  He’s also one of the few characters to be given a name.  Even the female lead played by Rachel Weisz lacks a name.  As it is, the movie focuses mostly on Farrell and Weisz as they meet with the rebel group the Loners, a bunch that works to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum with enforced solitude.  There’s no happy medium here.

Shot mostly with natural light and with minimal if any make-up on the actors, the film’s just odd, though largely in a good way.  There’s a certain Brechtian quality to the film, given it’s lack of emotions or any sort of characters to form much of a meaningful connection with.  Farrell is not the handsome actor audiences might be used to seeing, even if he doesn’t go quite to the lengths of Christian-Bale-in-American–Hustle in terms of getting away from his usual look.  Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos made this as his first English language film, so I wonder if I had more experience with his work if that would have made much difference in my view.  As it is, I’m giving this one eight and a half Reillys out of ten.