What are we supposed to do with a movie like “Human Capital”? It opens with a banquet-hall waiter, somewhere in Westchester, being run off the road and into a coma, then spends the rest of its 97 minutes with the folks who maybe did it. The movie is not concerned about the waiter, or the family he was on his way home to. The other characters don’t care either.
I could forgive the indifference, if we’d been plunked down for some hearty character exploration or a juicy moral essay. But maybe I’m asking too much of a movie that couldn’t bother to call itself anything more than “Human Capital.”
The loose sources are an American novel (by Stephen Amidon) and a much better Italian movie by the same name, from 2013. But the Italian movie, which Paolo Virzì directed, had a marrow-deep instinct for class. There were higher costs. The people in it were stranger, with sharper angles; they were alive. This new movie, which Oren Moverman wrote, Marc Meyers directed and has parts for Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, is a character study that hasn’t done its homework.
After the car hits the waiter, played in a blink by a charismatic Dominic Colón, the story jumps somewhere else. A real estate broker named Drew Hagel (Schreiber) drives his teenage daughter, Shannon (Maya Hawke), to hang out with her boyfriend, Jamie (Fred Hechinger), at his family’s grand concrete, stone and steel manse. Rather than drive back home, Drew mopes around the property. I knew I was in for a rough hour and a half when Jamie’s dad, Quint (Peter Sarsgaard), gets a load of Drew and, rather than say “I love ‘Ray Donovan!’” or “Which defensive line were you on?” invites him to help win a tennis match.
Drew is so taken with Quint and the hedge fund he runs that he takes out a $300,000 bridge loan to invest in it. His application is riddled with financial hyperbole. But he needs in — so desperately, in fact, that he dismisses a call from Shannon saying, “It’s just my daughter.”
Schreiber is playing this part as though there were a depth to Drew. He gives him a strong working man’s New York accent. But the movie doesn’t give him anything to act. Not anything compelling. When Drew’s wife, Ronnie (Betty Gabriel, pitifully underused), tells him she is expecting, he looks unmoved. We’re supposed to wonder: Is he thinking about Quint’s firm? The risk in performing preoccupation is you can wind up looking bored. Anyway, it’s obvious the minute you hear Sarsgaard hiss his first line that Drew’s 300K has nowhere to go but south.
Just when I thought I couldn’t take much more of Drew’s desperate choices, Moverman switches perspectives, to Tomei, who’s playing Jamie’s mother, Carrie — hair, shades, fur, a touch of snoot. We watch her have a day — she visits her mentally absent mother, buys some clothes and, for kicks, a decrepit old movie palace. (“Kids have never seen ‘Singing in the Rain’!”)
This is the film’s most successful stretch. Maybe because it doesn’t take a great imagination to conjure up “life of an unhappy rich lady.” Books and soaps have got centuries of those. Give her somebody sexy to flirt with, give her a crushing blow, let Marisa Tomei do the acting. I don’t know that she’s having a great time here, but she certainly seems invested and connected to whoever she’s sharing a scene with.
She’s not enough, though. Eventually, the script moves on to a third P.O.V. that’s supposed to deepen the first two. All there is to say about that is that it involves Alex Wolff, who played the tortured son in “Hereditary” and knows how to wring drama from even a diet-tragedy. He’s just about the only person here who can. Wolff is spared the rest of cast’s groaners like: “All this anxiety is palpable” and “human misery is a profit indicator” and “when did elite become such a dirty word?” None of that, by the way, has anything to do with the waiter. Remember him?
The movie might argue that making him negligible is the entire point. But the filmmakers don’t seem interested in a true class crisis. This is a yarn. And the longer it spends ignoring him, flirting with his accident, the better off I’m convinced he is.
Human Capital
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
