It’s the end of the world, and Guy Maddin feels fine in ‘Rumours’
“Rumours” — 2.5 stars
“Rumours” is an unexpected development in the career of Canadian filmmaking maverick Guy Maddin: It almost looks like a normal movie. Don’t be fooled.
Collaborating for the second time with co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson (the trio combined to helm “The Green Fog” in 2017), Maddin delivers a disarmingly gonzo absurdist comedy about Western world leaders lost in the woods, figuratively and literally. It’s good enough that you wish it were perfect.
Maddin’s previous films, including “The Saddest Music in the World” (2003), “My Winnipeg” (2007) and “The Forbidden Room” (2015, co-directed by Evan Johnson), inhabit a wonderful Netherland of early-cinema surrealism, with black-and-white cinematography and silent-movie techniques used to tell tales of woeful melodramatic excess. His works are majestically out of time, whereas “Rumours” is filmed in color, takes place today — or perhaps the day after today — and features bona fide movie stars.
Yes, that’s Cate Blanchett as German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann, hosting the annual Group of Seven conference at a secluded sylvan retreat, and there’s Charles Dance — the former Tywin Lannister of “Game of Thrones” — as aging American President Edison Wolcott. Nikki Amuka-Bird plays a finicky British prime minister and Denis Ménochet a blustery president of France. There’s a genial little idiot of an Italian PM played by Rolando Ravello, Takehiro Hira as Japan’s leader, and Roy Dupuis as Maxime Laplace, a horny, neurotic prime minister of Canada with a man bun.
These seven have gathered at a picturesque gazebo away from the main house, ostensibly to discuss treaties, the world economy and an unspecified global crisis that demands a provisional statement from the G-7. The characters get to work on this last item as if it were a school project, dividing up into teams and dithering interminably. At a certain point, it becomes apparent that they have been abandoned by their respective retinues and enablers and that some kind of apocalypse is unfolding just over the horizon.
Does what’s happening have anything to do with the 2,000-year-old bodies of Iron Age bog men that have been excavated near the meeting site and that seem to have come back to life to stalk the nighttime woods? Is there something even more unthinkable lurking at the center of the forest? “Rumours” slowly becomes the kind of experience willing to subject its polite, well-groomed professional politicians to all sorts of film genres, the more disreputable the better.
Maddin and the Johnson brothers drolly chart the meltdown of diplomatic tact and international comity in the face of the unknown and the ridiculous. The joke of the charade is that there’s not far to go. The Canadian PM is having/has had affairs with the leaders of England and Germany and the secretary general of the European Commission (Alicia Vikander), who is found wandering near the Horrible Thing speaking of “a black storm coming” in an unknown tongue that turns out to be Swedish.
The American president has a habit of falling asleep while dictating speeches and mulling at length over his legacy. (“I should like to have been assassinated. Too late for that now, I suppose.”) He also speaks in a British accent for reasons that are commented on but never resolved.
“Rumours” is too slaphappy to function as the fine-tuned political satire one might want it to be, and too often the gags hit a nonsensical dead end. Kristian Eidnes Andersen’s stormy musical score seems a holdover from earlier Maddin films and doesn’t sit well with this one’s semi-naturalism; it’s too obviously parodic. But the cast has a ball playing empty suits coming apart at the end of the world, the filmmakers don’t throw away a single idea and the dialogue is often laugh-out-loud funny in its straight-faced weirdness. A scene in which the characters try to figure out whether an incoming text message is from a child in need of help or an AI bot trained to catch pedophiles is a master class in comic double talk.
I’d like to think someone came up with “Rumours” by imagining an episode of “Lost” starring Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, Margaret Thatcher and Shigeru Ishiba. Perhaps with a little pharmaceutical help, although Maddin has always seemed to march to his own unique brain chemistry.
It’s the kind of movie where you appreciate the parts that work and forgive the rest, from the deadpan opening credits, with thanks to “the G-7 leaders for their support and consultation during the making of this film,” to the parting present the German chancellor hands out to each of her fellow world leaders: a gift bag with a suicide pill inside. You won’t find a better description of “Rumours” than that.
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In theaters. Rated R for some sexual content, partial nudity and violent content. 103 minutes.