Cannes Film Festival: Robert De Niro, Johnny Depp, and the banality of evil

At the press convention following the Cannes premiere of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, somebody requested Robert De Niro about his character, a kingpin of a kind with a tough psyche. “It’s the banality of evil,” he mentioned, describing the character’s ethical ambiguity. “It’s the thing we have to watch out for. We see it today, of course. We all know who I’m going to talk about, but I’m not going to say his name.” (Everyone knew who he meant.)

The banality of evil was sizzling at Cannes this yr. De Niro’s assertion got here on the heels of the premiere of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which set Cannes critics abuzz about the identical phrase. That film — which I proposed would possibly finest be understood as an adaptation of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, much more than the Martin Amis novel it’s loosely based mostly on — just isn’t very similar to Killers of the Flower Moon, at first blush. Glazer’s is brief, taut horror that evokes the Holocaust by retaining it offscreen; Scorsese’s is epic, bloody, and relentless in its depiction of a collection of murders from a century in the past.

Thematically, nevertheless, they typically rhyme. Both are about mankind’s capability to exterminate each other whereas deluding themselves into pondering they’re doing the precise factor. Both are about atrocities so heinous they’re laborious to wrap your thoughts round. And each really feel eerily up to date, in an age the place prejudice, racism, and fascism are on the rise across the globe.

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Yet, with deep respect to De Niro (who provides considered one of his best performances in Killers), solely considered one of these films is definitely concerning the banality of evil, and it’s not the one he’s in. A key a part of Arendt’s argument in Eichmann in Jerusalem is that her topic, Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Third Reich’s euphemistically named “Final Solution,” was profoundly vapid, missing a discernible motivation or aware vendetta towards the Jewish folks he exterminated. (This is the chilling sense you get about The Zone of Interest’s characters, too.) Arendt noticed Eichmann in court docket, the place his protection was that he merely adopted orders. What struck her was his lack of ego or intelligence or private motivation. This evil, she wrote, was banal as a result of it was hole, perpetuated largely by individuals who had given up pondering, letting themselves exist inside a corrupt and lethal system.

That just isn’t the case with William Hale, De Niro’s character in Killers of the Flower Moon. Hale is difficult, to make certain — as De Niro famous, he appears to genuinely love the Osage folks whereas actively plotting to kill them off and take their wealth for himself. But his motivation is clear, his ego boundless, his vanity and manipulation and conviction of his personal supremacy on a degree that rivals any mob boss from a Scorsese movie. He is, certainly, a bit paying homage to the previous president De Niro refused to call; one line supply (during which Hale boasts about his entry to the most effective legal professionals) even appears modeled on Trump. But what he (and Trump) is not is banal.

That doesn’t make Hale much less evil than, say, Eichmann. But it does make him distinctive, the form of one that individuals are nonetheless speaking a couple of hundred years after the very fact. If The Zone of Interest’s characters are banally evil, then Killers of the Flower Moon’s antagonists are sharply evil, even those who aren’t masterminds. (Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Ernest Burkhart shares some key qualities with Eichmann — he’s not very vibrant, he’s simply suggestible, and he doesn’t like pondering — however he’s completely motivated, loudly and passionately, by cash.)

Cannes is an attention-grabbing place to contemplate evil, in each its banal and distinctive varieties. As the competition concludes its 76th version, it stays probably the most prestigious on this planet, its iconic crimson carpet attracting dense crowds of onlookers who stake out a spot hours earlier than premieres (18, for Killers) only for the opportunity of seeing a star within the flesh. Filmmakers across the globe think about a Cannes berth the apex of a profession. The competition is nicely conscious of its cachet, that it’s the place the place artists achieve a form of immortality. Walk across the metropolis of Cannes in the course of the competition, and there are posters in all places of stars current and previous on the crimson carpet, simply to remind you that that is the place the legends have walked.

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That means the competition wields a virtually unparalleled kingmaking energy, an authority that the competition’s director Thierry Frémaux appears to each love and deny. Frémaux all the time manages to be controversial, however for 2023 he took it to new heights, programming the controversial French director Maïwenn’s interval drama Jeanne du Barry, concerning the favourite mistress of King Louis XV, for the competition’s opening evening gala. Opening evening films at Cannes are sometimes not excellent; Jeanne du Barry is, certainly, very dangerous, bafflingly so. But the movie’s pre-fest buzz was nearly totally a perform of its director, who’s identified for her vocal anti-MeToo stances and up to date assault of a journalist, and its star, Johnny Depp, in his first main position since his circus of a court docket battle with ex-wife Amber Heard.

Prior to the movie’s premiere, Frémaux claimed in an interview that he didn’t actually have any concept why this was controversial. “I don’t know about the image of Johnny Depp in the US,” he mentioned, claiming he solely has “one rule: it’s the freedom of thinking, and the freedom of speech and acting within a legal framework.” He was, he claimed, “one person who didn’t find the least interest in this very publicized trial.” If reporters wished to know why Depp was within the film, Frémaux mentioned, “you should ask Maïwenn.”

It was a wierd reply to a comparatively easy query, for causes that haven’t all that a lot to do with both Depp or Maïwenn. The opening evening gala at Cannes isn’t just some random screening down on the native multiplex; it’s a place of honor, a sign of what an establishment values. That’s what makes Frémaux’s response so unusual: it’s one factor to decide on to provide platforms to 2 deeply controversial figures, however one other altogether to refuse to defend them by explaining that alternative. Given the competition’s relatively ostentatious alternative to not program new movies by Woody Allen or Roman Polanski, two of its former favorites, it’s particularly unusual. To shrug at these details not solely reductions the ability Cannes holds, however is a sideways insult to the filmmakers — and swings dangerously near claiming you’re simply following orders.

But Cannes just isn’t one man. Sprinkled additional all through the competition had been reflections on ethical ambiguity and outright badness, in Scorsese’s and Glazer’s films in addition to many others. Todd Haynes’s May December contains a central relationship based mostly loosely on the notorious case of Mary Kay Letourneau, who spent seven and a half years in jail after being convicted of kid rape following a sexual relationship with a 12-year-old in her sixth-grade class. She then married him, in the end having six kids with him. May December imagines a fictionalized model of the pair (performed by Julianne Moore and Charles Melton) a few years into their marriage, once they’re visited by an actress (Natalie Portman) doing analysis for a job. The movie is humorous and campy and off-kilter, however by no means loses its purposefully queasy undertone; one thing dangerous occurred right here, folks had been and are being exploited, and the psychological gymnastics on show are each extraordinary and, in a way, very acquainted. Cliches about love and romance can’t fairly push all of it away, and the movie needs us to dwell within the discomfort.

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It was the identical in Wang Bing’s extraordinary documentary Youth (Spring), which facilities on the lives of younger folks, principally of their late teenagers or early twenties, who work in China’s textile factories making low-cost garments. The movie’s three-and-a-half hour runtime is blanketed with pop music within the background, lyrics laden with swoony romantic fantasies; in the meantime, within the foreground, the employees dwell very in another way, casually talking of sexual assault and exploitation by bosses whereas additionally merely residing the most effective lives doable below the circumstances.

Justine Triet’s unimaginable Anatomy of a Fall hinges on how the authorized system employs euphemisms about “opinion” and “fact,” reminiscence and gender and love, to control the which means of justice. In How to Have Sex, a debut from Molly Manning Walker, a younger English lady on trip together with her buddies discovers how cruelly some male acquaintances can wield language to cowl up evil conduct. About Dry Grasses, from the good Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, options at its core a schoolteacher who’s a lot snug with the misogyny round him, regardless of feeling like he’s above the folks in his village. The Sweet East, from Sean Price Williams, is a careening tour by the stupidest underbelly of American society: white supremacists, misogynistic violence, a world that gleefully sexualizes younger girls. Or there’s Monster, from grasp filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda, a narrative that retains flipping and altering and doesn’t reveal until close to the top how a lot it’s concerning the energy of lazy language to warp a toddler’s self-image. Even The Idol, Sam Levinson’s new HBO present (two episodes of which premiered at Cannes), picks up the theme in its personal approach, embodying the identical merciless hatred of younger girls within the pop trade that it seemingly intends to skewer.

The record might go on; what’s putting is how typically the flicks at this yr’s Cannes truly had been concerning the easy banality of evil, perpetuated or indulged in by abnormal individuals who have left thought behind and adopted, as a substitute, the system during which they discover themselves. You can’t make a proclamation concerning the future from a range at a movie competition, however the lack of outstanding and identifiable villains, no less than in my viewing, was putting, Killers of the Flower Moon however. If there’s a message emanating from Cannes this yr — muddled because it may be — it’s that the world is about as much as make evil as straightforward as doable to partake in. Whether we select to start out serious about it clearly is the query that lingers, lengthy after the lights come down and the crimson carpet is rolled again up.