Sam Levinson has been in a talkative mood. One need only look to the last two episodes of Euphoria, structured to focus separately on Rue and Jules, to know that. With Malcolm & Marie, that chatty Kathy dialogue most still associate with Richard Linklater (whose style recently infiltrated Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things) ramps up from a mere one hour to almost a full two. Already garnering “comparisons” to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (which is rather insulting to Edward Albee), the script is a back and forth verbal sparring between newly minted “auteur” Malcolm Elliott (John David Washington, going in an entirely different direction from Tenet here) and Marie Jones (Zendaya, Levinson’s obvious muse).
Having freshly returned from Malcolm’s movie premiere, it’s evident from the outset that something is eating at Marie. And, speaking of eating, she is quick to prepare a pot of boiling water to make Malcolm some mac and cheese even though it’s already one a.m. “Those Hollywood types” obviously don’t worry about food. But Malcolm does, determined, ostensibly, not to let success go to his head despite the praise that was just lavished on him for his movie about a Black female drug addict going through the rigmarole of getting clean. This premise, of course, instantly reminds us of Zendaya’s character on Euphoria–and, indeed, plenty of crew members from said show worked on Malcolm & Marie.
Shot in the summer of 2020 and serving as the first example of a production implementing strict COVID precautions, the reason for the script’s taut, confined nature might have been the pandemic, but it also seems to be Levinson’s grand statement about Cinema with a capital “C.” Using Malcolm as a mouthpiece to namecheck auteurs and movies of the past that actually “said something,” it’s no coincidence that this is shot in serious Black and White. The running motif–and a large part of the reason why the feature is in B&W (in addition to mirroring the staunch personas of the characters)–is a reverence for film, and how no one actually respects it anymore. The Best Years of Our Lives (mentioned twice) and Citizen Kane get bandied as requisite examples. William Wyler. Billy Wilder (even if shaded). These are the directors who made art (though one he should have mentioned, and who Levinson is also trying to emulate here, is John Cassavetes). And Malcolm is irritated to know that he will never be compared to them because of his Blackness. Commodified by the faux woke media that comprises publications like the Los Angeles Times, whose white female critic just loved Malcolm’s movie, already champing at the bit to politicize it in her review.
But Malcolm inherently resents that, because of his skin color, everything he does will be viewed as political. Hence his insistence to Marie, “It’s a film about a woman trying to get clean. It’s not a film about race.” The woman trying to get clean, Imani (also the name of the movie), is based on Marie, who feels that Malcolm has forgotten just how important her role was in birthing the “motion picture.” It is, after all, her life up there on the screen for all to see and judge. Except she doesn’t have any of the benefit of at least getting to star in it as she wanted to.
Allusions to this rancor are made subtly at first, building throughout the night until Marie lays everything bare. Though, initially, she assures, “I promise nothing productive is going to be said tonight.” This feels like a very non-veiled address to the audience as much as it is to Malcolm. A way for Levinson to get himself off the hook if viewers aren’t “smart enough” to appreciate “snappy dialogue” and “witty banter.” Considering that just about everything is contingent upon the script, a bright spot in Malcolm & Marie is Caterpillar House in Carmel (though, per Malcolm’s “Fuck Malibu!” line, we’re made to believe it’s there instead). Serving as the “third character,” of sorts, it gradually reveals different parts of itself throughout the movie as Malcolm and Marie traipse about the various rooms in their fevered states of rage and love.
Here, too, Levinson builds on an Old Hollywood theme: that all the “best” relationships are founded on an adversarial dynamic. The fine line between love and hate, as it were. Bacall and Bogart had it, Hepburn and Tracy, Ball and Arnaz and, to bring it all full-circle, Taylor and Burton.
Both Malcolm and Marie seem to understand something about playing the roles of these types of co-starring couples, each having their delusions about starring in the lead in the film called their shared life together. But Marie is starting to see that there is no “sharing” with Malcolm, only a lot of him taking. Which is why she’s so affronted when he “forgets” to thank her at the premiere. Leading her to sadly assess, “Once you know someone is there for you and once you know they love you, you never actually think of them again.”
This statement comes at the beginning of the movie, after he’s commenced the shtick of playing a song that expresses his mood, the first one being “Down and Out in New York” by James Brown. And yes, there are some “pointed” moments that reference New York being the “realer” of the two coasts, as all East Coast ilk like to posit when they’re “forced” to come to Hollywood to truly hit the big time. To that end, it’s no surprise that Spike Lee is mentioned on multiple occasions, along with Do The Right Thing, set in Bed-Stuy–where, quelle surprise, Imani is also set. And yes, Malcolm is already being billed as the next Spike Lee or Barry Jenkins (not Levinson, Sam’s father). But noticeably missing from the list of Obvious Black Auteurs to be compared to is Jordan Peele. Then again, maybe the story of a drug addict struggling to get clean isn’t “scary” enough.
The other key topic addressed throughout Malcolm & Marie, apart from a reverence for classic cinema and the conviction that you can’t love someone without also hating them, is a certain “wanting it both ways” phenomenon with regard to identity politics. Levinson, himself a white man, seems to be making it ultra meta in addressing the Black man’s struggle through his own perspective. That said, Malcolm simultaneously wants to be respected for his Blackness when it suits a political story (i.e. the Angela Davis biopic he’s going to direct) and also viewed “without any preconceptions” when he feels that should be the case. Malcolm, incidentally, touches on something that Edward Albee said more eloquently: “A writer who happens to be gay or lesbian must be able to transcend self. I am not a gay writer. I am a writer who happens to be gay.” Just as Malcolm is a filmmaker who happens to be Black and male. To that male point, Marie is critical, informing him that she wished, like the white female film critic from the LA Times, that he had brought a touch more femininity to the project. A gentleness that felt lacking to her, especially during a scene in which the lead actress is topless for no ostensible reason.
Malcolm, however, defends his artistic choices by berating those who would seek to define them by his gender or race, even if he does the same to “…some white-ass writer making it about race because it’s fucking convenient.” Mind you, making it about race is usually more inconvenient than convenient. So it is that Malcolm exclaims, “You can’t hang everything on identity! It’s all a fucking mystery. What drives a filmmaker! What drives an artist!”
But as is the norm, Malcolm has gone on a self-involved tangent that seems to forget that only a few minutes before, he was engaged in a very intense verbal tussle with Marie while she was taking a bath. It’s here that Malcolm delivers his most contemptuous barbs, including the mention of the many other women he’s been with that might have inspired the character of Imani.
After walking away from her, he’s now outside smoking, where she joins him in silence before snatching the cigarette out of his mouth and asking, “You gonna start smoking again?” Continuing the trend of communicating through song, Marie plays Dionne Warwick’s “Get Rid of Him,” featuring lyrics like, “I know he’s out to break my heart/And he’ll rip my dreams apart/But I love that fella so/And I’ll never let him go (get rid of him)/Oh, no.” Subtle. But then, neither of these characters are. And perhaps, in his own subversive way, Levinson is trying to debunk the “polite white couple” fighting cliche that has been allowed to flourish for so many decades in “microcinema.” Even Doug Liman (via Steven Knight’s script) attempted to do this (and failed) with last month’s Locked Down, granted he could only muster one Black person in the couple permutation. It’s obviously not a coincidence that the play-like subject matter that was more tried and true in the mid-twentieth century–domestic strife–is making a major comeback.
And it’s not only because a single filming location with limited characters makes everything easier right now, but because, like Malcolm and Marie, couples have been summarily “locked” into a space together with nowhere else to go and nothing else to look at but their own damaged psyches and accordingly broken relationships. In the meantime, all Marie can think is that it would have been nice to be cast in the lead role–because she lived it. To prove her acting chops for the part, she fucks with Malcolm’s head by grabbing a knife and saying, “I’ve never been clean. And I don’t plan on getting clean.” Again, it’s something Rue would say, and, in so many regards, this feels like Rue’s post-high school life if she decided to go hetero and move to the West Coast.
A soundtrack that would now be classified as “Sex and the City music” plays while scenes of them “winding down” for the night transpire. But the fight isn’t over, and Marie still has plenty left to say–even if Malcolm briefly thought he was home free in terms of finally getting some sex.
There is no grand “resolution.” Only the knowledge that they love one another, even if they so often feel nothing but hate. So they’ll go on to fight another day. Who knows? Maybe, having finally taken into account everything she said, Malcolm might even cast Marie in something he directs in the future… but maybe not.
Outkast’s “Liberation” plays as the credits roll and Levinson hits us over the head with the message: “There’s a fine line between love and hate, you see/Came way too late but, baby, I’m on it.” Applying not only to Malcolm and Marie’s relationship, it also pertains to the artist who risks putting his work out in the mainstream to be critiqued, creating a potential stream of hate from both sides–the artist, resenting their audience, and the audience, feeling they didn’t get what they wanted out of the art. The artist therefore risks condemnation, and worse still, being misunderstood. And yet we understand all too well exactly what Levinson wants to do here, it’s just that it doesn’t quite come off as the Great Film he was aiming for.
