Triangle of Sadness/The Menu
Eat the Rich
These two dark satires have much in common. Both are blunt revenge fantasies that tap into the frustration we all feel about the ultra rich who sack the world as it burns, contributing to its chaos with unstoppable energy. Both movies happen in a bubble away from the troubles of the world, as is true of the lives of the rich.
Triangle of Sadness by Ruben Östlund (the excellent Force Majeure, the not so excellent The Square), takes place in a luxury yacht cruise. It follows a couple of fashion models (Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson) who win a contest to serve as eye candy in this voyage. Its captain (an underused Woody Harrelson) is a drunk with a penchant for marxist thought who spends most of the time getting wasted in his room. The crew is instructed to never say no to any of the passengers’ whims, even if they put the entire ship in peril. The yacht is a microcosm of society: the brown people slave away below deck, the “presentable”, that is to say, the white uniformed crew tends to the passengers’ every wish, and the rich, a collection of vulgar, grotesque people. Not one of them of any station in life is fully dimensional. By a combination of the forces of nature and human hubris literally everything turns to shit. Then the tables are turned on the rich, who are incapable of surviving by themselves. It is a good premise, marred by excess and by Östlund’s arrogance in playing God with the characters, for whom he seems to have mostly contempt.
In The Menu, directed by Mark Mylod, Ralph Fiennes plays Julian Slowik, a star chef who invites a selected group of wealthy and famous people to his multi-starred restaurant on an island where he will cook a memorable meal as revenge for all the slights he has ever endured. But one of the guests (the compelling Anya Taylor Joy) is not originally on the list, and this is a hitch for Slowik’s carefully orchestrated evening. This movie is more fun than Triangle of Sadness. It is structured as a multi-course menu and its skewering of the borderline absurdity and pretentiousness of molecular gastronomy and of insufferable menu descriptions is spot on. But as in Triangle of Sadness, the wish for spectacular revenge undermines the subtlety that serves satire best. Mylod has directed many episodes of Succession, the best satire on television if not elsewhere, so he knows that it stings best in the details. In my view the best show currently on TV, Succession only faltered with the episode called “Boar on the Floor”, in which Logan Roy, the media magnate, humiliates his staff with a grotesque game at an elegant dinner. It was too much even for Logan Roy’s generous standards of villainy. Similarly, when increasingly preposterous, horrifying things happen in The Menu, the film loses its bite. Unlike in Get Out! — the best example of the satirical horror genre I assume The Menu wants to belong to — the interplay between horror and satire is not as seamless. In Get Out! the metaphor works because being Black in white America is a nightmare. The same cannot be said about the story of a working-class chef who has risen to the top and wants to mete out punishment, as deserved as it may be. By the way, Slowik is reminiscent of Lydia Tár, both talented people who rise to great heights and become monsters.
Obviously, there is something in our not so unconscious collective that wants to unpack the havoc the rich and powerful wreak in our society and punish them for it. We should welcome as many merciless satires against the very rich and powerful as we can muster. It is understandable for writers to want to go to extremes; after all, the ultra rich are extreme and they deserve the worst, if only from our imaginations, given that it is evident that nothing ever touches them in real life. But in fiction, the more grotesque the revenge fantasy, the less power it wields.
I admit to enjoying Östlund’s revenge on the rich as they are stubbornly fed raw oysters at the Captain’s dinner on a stormy night, but the torrents of shit and vomit Östlund unleashes wear thin. Some people enjoy gross-out humor. I think it is a heavy-handed trope and an unsatisfying substitute for actually funny stuff — a cop out. Experiencing cringe for over two hours is not the same as fun. The plot of Triangle of Sadness is blunt and there are no characters to care about except for the head of household, (the excellent Dolly De Leon) a woman who then turns the tables on her masters. She is no angel either. In Triangle of Sadness the rich are thin, vulgar caricatures. As intense as the movie is, it left my consciousness soon after it ended. It does have a good twisty ending, though.
In The Menu, the characters are one-dimensional symbols of power and hypocrisy: a washed up movie star, some finance bros, a deluded foodie, a pretentious food critic, etc. But it helps that the writing is sharp and they are portrayed by an a-list cast (including Janet McTeer, John Leguizamo, Nicholas Hoult, Reed Birney, Judith Light, and Hong Chau, who kills as the Maitre ‘d). Fiennes imbues this mercurial, tyrannical chef with a rueful sadness, elegant snark, and intelligence. Slowik keeps everything under the tightest façade of control, except when he lashes out at the benighted soul who had the nerve to ask for substitutions (I’m with him on that one — off with his head!). The way Fiennes enunciates hard the consonants in the word “cook” as he commands someone to do it: this is why this actor is a master. Finally, it is worth the price of admission just to listen to Ralph Fiennes utter the words “taco”, “al pastor”, and “tortillas”. I can die happy now.
In Succession, the rich and the rich-adjacent are godawful people but the show manages to make us care for them almost against our will (they are funny and pathetic, vain, clueless needy, and terrible). The show does not concern itself with the have-nots, and by ignoring them it smartly keeps at bay the moralizing which is the kiss of death of satire. Alas, the writers of these two movies cannot control the impulse to represent the grievance of the common man or woman, which is not really necessary. Let’s just eat the rich, no mayo.
