By Alex Bauman
I've been waiting for Mute for years. It's been a passion project for Duncan Jones and seemed to have plenty of elements that I would love. It's science-fiction, it's neo-noir, it's set in the same universe as Moon, one of my favorite movies of all time.
In May 2009, I attended the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF). I'm 13 years old. I see the film Moon, directed by a first-timer named Duncan Jones, who I later learn is David Bowie's son. I love the movie and rewatch it several times over the years, showing it to many friends. Sam Rockwell is quickly established as one of my favorite actors and I'm eager to see what Duncan Jones does yet. After the screening at SIFF, Duncan Jones comes up and answers questions. I have nothing to ask, but do take the opportunity to take a low-quality photo. The one thing that I did learn about Duncan Jones that day is that he's a very passionate man. He's in it for the art and there's something I can respect about that.
Here it is zoomed in, not that it helps.
It's 2018. I'm 22 years old. I'm psyched for the release of Mute. I first heard about the movie many years ago. Duncan Jones decided to put it off to direct Source Code in 2011. Then he put it off again to direct Warcraft in 2016. But now the film is happening. The trailer comes out and I think it looks fantastic. Here's an actual comment I posted on a message board regarding the trailer:
"Yes! I’ve been waiting for this movie for so many years. It’s a little surreal that it’s finally coming out. I just hope I can watch it with realistic expectations."
Mute follows the story of Leo (Alexander Skarsgård), a mute bartender searching for his missing girlfriend in 2035 Berlin. We simultaneously see the story line of Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd), an American surgeon running a black market clinic with Duck (Justin Theroux), while trying to care for her daughter and find a way out of the country. Seemed interesting enough.
Then the film came out and it was critically panned. You could say I was a little heartbroken. I wait 2 months before finally watching it. My previously high expectations have now morphed into low expectations when I finally watch it. It's hard to say how much these expectations affected my thoughts on the film. Did I like Mute? Nope. Did I hate Mute? Not really. Mute is less a bad film and more a really frustrating one because it has ideas that could potentially be interesting only to do nothing with them. It feels like the first draft of a script before all of the polish has occurred.
I have a lot to say about this movie and a lot of it isn't exactly positive, but let's get some of what I liked acknowledged first. Visually speaking, the film is nice. It's not incredible, but I definitely remember that there were points in the film when I was enjoying the shots and visual effects onscreen. Nothing super memorable per se, but it is a competently directed picture. The world-building isn't exactly great (more on that later) but there's still something sorta cool just about seeing this futuristic Berlin at times. Clint Mansell's score is nowhere near as good as in Moon, but it's still pretty decent.
As mentioned, this film is set in the same universe as Duncan Jones' previous film, Moon. One thing I appreciated was that the references to Moon were subtle. A couple of times, I simply noticed things in the background. Someone who hadn't seen Moon won't be distracted by the emergence of something that doesn't make sense to them and those who have are trusted to be smart enough to pick up subtle things. Of course, part of me wishes we could've seen more, that Sam Rockwell could've had a bigger cameo, but it's for the best that this film focuses on standing on its own.
Paul Rudd in Mute
Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux play two American surgeons on the black-market with a sort of ambiguous relationship. They call each other "babe" but the young girl with them is explicitly only Rudd's daughter, not Theroux's and Theroux is regularly flirting with barely-legal girls. They have pretty solid chemistry and I was usually most interested in the film whenever they were onscreen. Rudd is definitely the best part of the film and it's pretty great to see him shine in something more villainous and serious. But even my use of the word villainous shouldn't confuse the fact that his character is very morally grey and I appreciated the film's attempt to make him multi-dimensional. Unfortunately, this sometimes results in his character feeling a bit inconsistent in how he's written. Mainly that there are a couple of points when his character becomes bizarrely antagonistic without any real motivation behind it, that it's like the film didn't know how to write a sympathetic villain so they just flipped an on-off switch, having him go from sympathetic in one scene to inexplicably antagonistic in the next. Still, I enjoyed Rudd's performance overall and found him a lot more interesting than the film's protagonist.
As for what I didn't like. Well, here's one of the biggest problems as alluded to above. Leo is a boring protagonist. Alexander Skarsgård has been sweeping various award shows recently, winning an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a SAG Award for his performance in Big Little Lies. He's definitely capable of being a great actor, but he's not interesting at all here, though I think that's less Skarsgård's fault and more a fault of the writing. Leo is mute and he's Amish. That's about all that we know about him as a character. It's hard to get emotionally invested in him because we rarely know what's going on internally. He doesn't appear to know sign language so we only see him communicate when he writes down very small phrases. This serves in contrast to Eliza in The Shape of Water, another mute character, as we understand her internal conflict. Part of this is helped by her use of sign language and consistent interactions with other characters. Leo's interactions with characters mainly seem to exist just to bring him to the next location, not really showcase him as a person in any way. Hell, The Shape of Water was even able to tell us about Eliza by just showing her morning routine. I'm not saying that writing a protagonist as mute doesn't bring challenges that a non-mute protagonist probably wouldn't have, but if you're going to do it, then you need to put in an effort to write them well. Muteness is not a character trait and if Leo had any type of character arc over the course of the film, I didn't see it. There is a very quick scene where we see Leo swimming in a pool and then silently screaming underwater, which I thought was an effective way of showing the internal struggle of his character, but that alone wasn't enough to make him feel multi-dimensional.
Alexander Skarsgård in Mute
Since I've mentioned Leo being Amish, I should bring up another issue that the film has. It tends to introduce intriguing ideas and then go nowhere with them. That's the thing. There are individual scenes that I think work quite well on their own. There were points in the movie when things were introduced and I was intrigued to see how the film developed this, but then the film didn't develop these ideas at all. The pieces are there, but the effort to make them actually fit is not.
In regards to that point, there are a lot of missed and somewhat confusing elements in regards to making Leo Amish. First off, I despise the idea that certain minority groups should only be given representation if their minority status has a direct impact on the story. But the decision to make Leo Amish makes things a little confusing. He's an Amish guy living in Berlin in 2035 with a non-Amish girlfriend. It's never really clear why an Amish guy would be living in a city so technology-heavy in the first place. That could've been an idea to explore, but it's barely acknowledged. He just turns away from the TV when he's in a diner. Cool.
Noticeably, once Leo starts using technology in the film, he seems to pick up everything pretty quickly. Honestly, an easy fix to this would've been to have just made the character having been from an Amish family but no longer actively practicing the Amish beliefs to explain that, but he's clearly established as still practicing Amish customs. But if Leo needed to be actively practicing Amish customs, there was still an interesting idea that could've been explored. Here's a guy who's been ignoring the technologically-advanced world around him because of his beliefs. Now his girlfriend has vanished and he must cast his beliefs aside and do whatever it takes to find her. Seeing him struggle to use and understand technology in the name of finding the woman he loves could've been interesting, but like I said, he picks up everything pretty easily, and we never get any sense of internal conflict over him using technology against his belief system.
That's not the only missed opportunity. The film naturally builds up a pretty cool fight with an intimidating character that ends up occurring entirely off screen. But the biggest screw-up is one that many have mentioned. I'll keep it vague but there's a controversial plot element inserted in the second half of the film. I actually enjoyed the scene that introduced this plot element. It was well-acted and I was excited to see how the story developed on it. The revelation about this character should change everything. But in the next scene, it's like the revelation didn't even happen. It's one of the weirdest tonal shifts I can think of in recent memory and makes the characters feel so...inconsistent.
One of the saddest failures of Mute would have to be its world-building. It's worth noting that Mute was original meant to be set in modern times before being changed to 2035 and it certainly shows. The sci-fi setting is mainly just there for decoration, not really for anything interesting. The film mainly just seemed to think that throwing in some occasional weird shit would compensate for that, but it really doesn't. The most egregious example would be a scene with Dominic Monaghan dressed as a Geisha with some sex robots in his room. It doesn't say anything about the world. It doesn't say anything about the character because we never see him again. It's just showing sex robots to be...quirky and shocking, I guess. It doesn't even feel authentic to this character we barely know. Monaghan's character is clearly embarrassed by having somebody else see his sex robots, but still answers the door dressed like a geisha with a whip? Why not just establish him as not caring if somebody sees this stuff? Or attempting to get out of his geisha clothing before answering the door? There's also a nearly unrecognizable Robert Sheehan wearing...plastic on his face? I guess that could be fashionable in 17 years...
The pacing isn't great. I can't say I was as bored as some people apparently were, but it did feel like a took a long time for anything to really happen and near the end, there was definitely some faulty character logic that seemed to only be there to drag things out. The ending itself is pretty dumb for a lot of plot-specific reasons. One character involved in the climax is such a plot-device that their presence just felt annoying. They're not even really reacting to anything. They're just sorta there.
I didn't hate Mute but the flaws definitely outweigh the few things that work. It's just a shame that a passion project from a genuinely talented director turned out this way. If the film attempted actual world-building and tried to follow-through on ideas it introduced, I think it had the potential to be a really great film. But it doesn't and the result is a dull affair. Hopefully Duncan Jones learns from the mistakes of Mute and does something better next time, especially since he apparently hopes to make another film set in the same universe as Moon and Mute.
5/10
