It’s always interesting, though not always for the right reasons, when a director on a publicity tour manages to undermine his own movie. At this year’s Venice Film Festival the headlines about Paul Schrader were not about The Basics of Philosophy, the movie receiving its world premiere. Oh no, he decided to tell everybody that he plans to use AI ‘actors’ in his next film, because he could find no human actors willing to play the parts. [Save your sympathy; this seems to be because the parts are off-the-charts problematic, which is saying something for both Hollywood generally and Mr. Schrader’s track record specifically.] The fact everyone leaped all over these comments is because they’re easier to discuss than The Basics of Philosophy, which is a failure. But it’s a failure of an interesting kind and, because its failure is entirely human, it still deserves to have some critical consideration of why it doesn’t work.
John (Jack Huston) is the philosophy professor at a midwestern liberal arts college, in a happy but semi-secret relationship with another professor, Rebecca (Sofia Boutella), a single mother with a pre-teen son. John is writing a book about Spinoza and gives lectures to his students, but he is mainly preoccupied with the terminal illness of his disliked father Melvyn (Bill Pullman) and the requests placed on him by his father’s partner Gloria (Dana Delany, by far the best thing about the film). As Melvyn’s end is near, a man named Miguel (Daniel Zovatto) reappears, which throws John’s entire life into disarray. John had managed to block out both his own and his family’s history with Miguel and didn’t seem to know that over the years Melvyn came to feel Miguel was a second son. But we all know you can’t run forever, especially when you’re running from yourself.
Even if the execution is frankly not great, what we have here is Mr. Schrader, who also wrote the script, grappling with the impact of Me Too from the point of view of a perpetrator. The whole movie inexpertly tries to explore how privilege can enable wealthy white men to get away with too much, and what happens when that privilege runs out. But it is doing this from a point of sympathy with John, despite thinking that John doesn’t deserve said sympathy. This is an eyebrow-raising topic, one that certainly deserved better execution than Karl Glusman in a community-theatre-level costume as Spinoza chatting with John in a park. Mr. Huston spends way too much time staring into the distance over a laptop, and the scenes in and around a line-dancing-themed gay bar are so frustratingly silly that it would have been better to cut that subplot.
And yet. Considering Mr. Schrader’s background and track record, for him this is a wildly innovative and daring attempt to empathise with people he has othered or ignored for most of his career. The choice of Ms. Boutella as the romantic lead emphasises both the good intentions and the woeful execution here. She is clearly beloved in Hollywood, able to pick and choose with whom she wishes to work, but absolutely none of the male directors currently working in Hollywood have any idea of how to make the best of her. The most interesting moment in the whole film is the final shot, which reveals what should be a happy moment is one of denial and dread, and which widens out the target of the film’s anger from perpetrators into those who enable them, too. But it’s much too little, much too late.
And yet I am unable to wholly condemn The Basics of Philosophy. Despite the enormous flaws in how it handles its subject matter, and that it’s much too talky, looks cheap and feels flimsy, somehow its heart wants to be in the right place. It’s not quite in the actual right place, but trying very hard to get there. The Basics of Philosophy mostly demonstrates how very hard it is for privileged people (men) to even consider letting go of their advantages even a little bit. But this little effort is better than nothing, and considering how much nothing we usually get from male movie directors on this topic, let’s hope other filmmakers watch The Basics of Philosophy and realise their human abilities can do better than this.
The Basics of Philosophy recently played at the Venice Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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