Review: Leave the World Behind (2023)
Stuck in the glittering trap we created
Leave the World Behind (2023)
Written and directed by Sam Esmail
from the novel by Rumaan Alam
Disaster movies seem so yesterday. It used to be that in order to see an ocean liner capsize, a skyscraper in flames, a city leveled by an earthquake, you had to watch a Hollywood has-been-crammed blockbuster. Everyone alive in the 1970s went to these movies, the best of which were tense for the first two acts, and then — after the disaster depicted on the movie’s poster occurred — showed a gripping story of survival. These films are why everyone now says, when mass casualties occur, “It was like a movie.”
The trend was revived in the 2000s as climate change entered the general subconscious, with movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” (2004) and “The Happening” (2008). In the latter film, a strange affliction sweeps the land and well-adjusted people are somehow unable to stop themselves committing suicide as quickly as possible. The movie ends with the main characters hiding out in an isolated house, terrified to expose themselves to an outdoors which seems determined to kill them (turns out the trees are somehow behind it, which makes a lot of sense, really).
Similarly, “Leave the Worth Behind” quickly isolates two families in a Long Island mansion, with the power out and all communications cut off. One family, led by a loveless, 50ish couple played by Ethan Hawke and Julia Roberts, has rented the palace for a weekend away. The other family, an African American father and daughter played by Mahershala Ali and Myha'la Herrold (credited only by her first name), own it.
The characters spend the entire film in two different modes: 1. wondering why their cell phones won’t work — a running joke is that the white family’s daughter is dying to watch the final episodes of “Friends” but can’t download it — and 2. witnessing intensely frightening disasters or effects caused by the unseen villains (whoever has caused the disruptions to satellites and the internet is guessed at wildly but never named). Deer stampede through the forest outside, a deafening electronic tone fills the air at unexpected moments, and planes crash around them. The one comic plague is that the baddies — we never learn who they are — have hacked all the Teslas and made them drive onto freeways and bash into each other, thus clogging the roads and preventing the characters from escaping.
The characters remain utterly unable to deal with any of it. They don’t form a plan; they don’t strike out on foot to reach their apartment back in the city. They just freak out in front of each other. The mom (Julia Roberts in an intentionally off-putting role) manages to stop bullying everyone long enough to realize that she’s being a privileged, racist shit to the African American characters. That’s about all the character development we get.
To make space for this, the black father, George, has to spend the entire time not reacting to the white people’s bitchiness and racism. He’s either doing a bit as the richest, most white-sympathizing, de-blacked black man in the world, or he is an enlightened being (yet one with only one iota more of a clue as to what is happening to the world and them) who will never react to shit. Oh, and he also has to go through the movie wearing a tuxedo, such that when he mixes a drink for his guests (in his own house, remember), he looks so much like a bartender at a fancy bar that the white dad (Ethan Hawke) accepts it. This aspect of George’s character is the least believable thing in the movie. I can believe that hackers can cause flamingos to fly from Florida to Long Island and land in the mansion’s swimming pool before I can believe that a black man can stifle his reactions while being treated like a criminal in his own house for days until the white people can chill out.
In 1982 my girlfriend Sally Seiter and I did a performance piece that incorporated an on-stage radio play. Called “Killer Trees,” the play-within-the-play was, essentially, the premise of “The Happening,” more than 25 years in advance, as an all-news AM radio station might cover it. A series of weird happenings added up to a revolt, of some sort, by nature against the virus known as humanity.
This revolt of nature trope is more profound than the “unnamed hackers cause chaos” trope animating “Leave the World Behind.” One of the best examples is the miniseries “Station 11,” in which a sudden pneumonic virus decimates humanity and turns back society to its pre-industrial state; the later series “The Last of Us” was basically a zombie movie except that the culprit was identified as a fungus.
Any way it happens, nature has many ways of killing almost all of us. Virus, fungus, wildfire, sea level rise — it all adds up to the breakdown of society. Because people love watching disasters unfold, the breakdown of society is almost always treated as a dystopian horror, although “Station 11” was more concerned with the aftermath in which society finds ways to pick itself back up again. A lot of people liked its post-industrial world, featuring a gentle troupe of Shakespearean actors making their way from town to town in horse-drawn wagons. To its credit, the series, and the novel by Emily St. John Mandel, complicate this bucolic image by adding an all-too-believable alternative to a theater troupe — a cult.
We watch these depictions of societal collapse with mixed emotions. Like the people on Twitter who say “Get me off this hellsite,” we are horrified by the society we’ve created, and long for it to go up in flames. We’re also horrified when it goes up in flames.
I think this has something to do with the feelings of at least some of the people in the crowd that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Enraged by what was happening in society, they thought that a cataclysmic event might tear it down so that it could be reborn in the image vaguely painted by Trump and his enablers — a white-dominated, patriarchal “Christian nation” that has never actually existed. Progressives and anarchists want a left-wing version, in which society is cooperative instead of capitalist; this, also, has never existed longer than a year, and probably never will.
What we have in common is dissatisfaction and a gnawing awareness that the status quo is unsustainable. What we’re not getting is any sort of training or education that would be of use in case one of the disaster scenarios occurs. I don’t mean marksmanship; I mean how to run a cooperative society, how to raise food, how to rebuild a culture that honors diversity and equity, and most of all, how to be kind to one another. Without work in advance, we’re all going to be the people in “Leave the World Behind” — clueless, panicking, wishing we even had a gun.
I don’t want to make this movie sound better than it is. It mostly misplays its hand, focusing too much on co-producer Julia Roberts’ character and on crowd-pleasing depictions of disasters. It’s too long, at more than two hours; and despite this length, it doesn’t even have a third act. Just as in “The Happening,” “Leave the World Behind” spends a full two hours setting up and illustrating these characters’ dilemma, then leaves them all there: in the mansion, with no way out, with no way of understanding what’s happened, and with no skills. The end. No slow starvation, no trek on foot away from the setting, no rescue.
I guess this could be read as a statement about where we are with climate change: stuck in the glittering trap we made, unable to deal or take any steps. (This is also a pandemic movie.) But the movie doesn’t leave viewers there; instead there’s a cute ending as the couple’s young daughter (a moon-faced Farrah Mackenzie, well directed by Esmail) resolves the “Friends” running joke. This can only be experienced as a weak attempt to give the audience a smile on the way out (though the film is straight-to-Netflix, not in theaters). We know that there isn’t one.