PARK CITY, Utah — An annoying new comedy starring Natalie Portman and Jenna Ortega asks whether a corpse is art or not.
movie review
THE GALLERIST
Running time: 94 minutes. Not yet rated.
I’m no modern art critic, but this ghastly movie sure belongs in the morgue.
Directed by Cathy Yan of “Birds of Prey,” “The Gallerist,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is yet another stale art-world satire with nothing to say except that collectors are pretentious nuts.
Ya think?
It checks all the usual boxes: affected voices, word-salad descriptions of paintings, rich snobs mingling to see and be seen, tired Bansky jokes.
If only the script could shred itself.
None of Yan’s movie is funny aside from its halfway decent inciting incident. A noxious influencer named Dalton (Zach Galifianakis) comes for a private tour of the Miami gallery of Polina Polinski (Portman), a deep-pocketed divorcee, during Art Basel. He slips on a puddle and gets impaled by a sculpture.
Instead of calling the police, though, Polina decides to make lemonade out of fatality and asks, “What if we keep him?” She pretends the body is part of the work by Stella Burgess (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) — called “The Emasculator” — and that it is not flesh, but silicone. Word spreads and picture-snapping spectators mob the place.
In short: Everyone’s a moron.
“That body meets the moment,” snooty Polina says in defense of her desperate act to her manic assistant Kiki.
Playing the spooked employee, who knows the ugly truth about the piece, Jenna Ortega tries to prove she’s more than that expressionless viral “Wednesday” dance by behaving like a crackhead air-traffic controller. Even considering her character is concealing an accidental death, the volume and size of the performance are way over the top.
The stakes are high for Polina — and not just the risk of imprisonment. She used her ex’s money to refashion an old Jiffy Lube into a gallery to make a name for herself, and the white-hot cadaver is the closest she’s come to success so far. Though, to call her morally complex would give the script too much credit.
Portman’s very weird in this — unappealingly so. With a cropped blond hairdo and “Mad Men” dress, she does a downer spin on Moira Rose from “Schitt’s Creek,” speaking in a breathy whisper and floating around with a furrowed brow as if she’s on painkillers.
Sedated-seeming though Portman is, her Polina is intense amid the haze, not unlike her Jackie O or her “Black Swan” ballerina. Only “Black Swan” had more laughs than “The Gallerist.”
Polina, Kiki, Stella and Kiki’s famous curator aunt Marianne (Catherine Zeta-Jones, who might as well have been green-screened in), realize they’ve gotta ditch the dead guy. Somebody will catch on, or he’ll decompose. So the quartet hatch a preposterous plan involving an auction and Polina’s boring ex (Sterling K. Brown), the “canned tuna king of Orlando,” to get deceased Dalton out of there.
For those keeping score at home, that’s three Oscar winners in this humorless mess.
The entire film is brow-raising. Granted, ludicrous things happen in comedies all the time. But Yan’s bright, candy-colored world, which becomes tiresome to look at, and her flat caricatures make believing the plot a stretch. If it were actually funny, that would be less of a problem.
Yet during the many lulls, you find yourself poking holes in their halfwitted scheme. Doesn’t the body have an odor? What about DNA? Other businesses’ security cameras? Dalton’s iPhone GPS? It’s not a good time watching the quartet work things out, since their ideas are so lazy. Danny Ocean is a Rhodes Scholar next to these bozos.
Stella remarks on their situation — and ours — remarkably well.
“Why put up with all this then? You could just leave.”
In my row of seats, many did just that.
