Wait, They Remade Vanilla Sky?

'The Congress' is kinda like the 113th—it does nothing

The Congress starts with a great premise: An aging, rumored-to-be-difficult actor named Robin Wright (and played by Robin Wright) is presented with a deal. A movie studio called Marimount (ha) wants to buy her likeness to use for 20 years in any way it wants. In exchange, she’ll be given a huge sum of money and give up the right to act in any way in any format for those 20 years.

After much hemming and hawing, Wright accepts. And then the premise that was so promising, and had so many different paths down which it could have walked, turns into a remake of Vanilla Sky (which is a remake of Abre los ojos, a movie that definitely did not need a remake). Why spend an hour and a half contemplating the nature of celebrity, aging and worship culture, which is how The Congress first presents itself, when you can turn it into a head trip? And like Vanilla Sky, The Congress even has a character to explain everything. Instead of Noah Taylor as Tech Support, it’s Jon Hamm’s voice and an animated body that looks like a cross between Hamm, Sean Penn and Clark Gable.

It’s not that movies can’t begin as one thing and then become another. Just take a look at Repo Man for an example of how sharp turns can work. It’s just that The Congress skimps on the emotions it wants us to draw on later, as if we can move through an extended hallucination and remember that we’re supposed to care about the characters at its beginning.

See, Wright has a son, Aaron, (Kodi Smit-McPhee in standard wimp mode) who’s suffering from a malady that will eventually leave him blind and deaf. One gets the impression Wright accepts the offer from the studio in order to spend more time with him; that’s never made clear by her, but it’s one of the rumors about her that other people, in the form of agents and studio heads, repeat over and over.

There’s a bigger problem, though. The Congress begins as a live-action movie and switches over to animation when Wright begins tripping out. In the script, it’s written as if she must, as a condition of her contract, become an avatar to participate in a big announcement at the 20th anniversary of her contract signing. In actuality, it’s an excuse to draw out-there pictures so the audience knows things are kooky and getting kookier. (For example, people who resemble Yoko Ono and Michael Jackson pop up as wordless characters, and what better way is there to show weirdness than Michael and Yoko?)

But the biggest problem is embodied by Hamm. His character, Dylan, is a Robin Wright superfan (not hard to believe) who spent years trying to find the real her after her likeness starting acting in movies. Then he does find her and spends roughly an hour explaining to her character—and by extension, the audience—what’s going in the real world and in her hallucination, just like Taylor did with Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky.

Eventually The Congress starts disappearing up its own ass as it tries to juggle all the derivative balls it’s throwing in the air. Really, who cares what happened to the kid? He’s on screen for about seven minutes, and in a movie that’s 123 minutes, shouldn’t we spend time getting to know the secondary characters before we trip balls over them?

 THE CONGRESS

Directed by Ari Folman

With Wright, Hamm and Harvey Keitel

Jean Cocteau Cinema

NR
123 min.

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