Downhill (2020) Review

 rating: ****

the story: A marriage hits a rough patch on a ski vacation.

review: Based on the Swedish film Force Majeure, Downhill is the third film directed by the duo of Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (The Descendants, The Way, Way Back). I haven’t seen Force Majeure. I have no earthly clue why it would be remotely relevant to worry about this when talking about Downhill.

Downhill is exactly like Faxon and Rash’s prior films. It’s a movie about awkward family moments that are both heavy and presented in as light a fashion as possible. There’s unpleasantness, and it might be uncomfortable to watch at times, but this is a legitimate way to make a movie, and is perhaps all the better for it.

George Clooney was the hook in Descendants, coming off arguably the best period of his career (Michael Clayton, Up in the Air). You care about his widower problems because of his inherent charm. You can put up with Steve Carell’s nastiness in The Way, Way Back because you also have Sam Rockwell at his most charming.

And you can cope with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who in Downhill is having the hardest time with a near-catastrophic event, because as counterpoint you have Will Ferrell. Before knowing anything about Downhill I really had no interest in it. I love Will Ferrell, but sometimes it just seems like his films are a Rolodex of every possible context for the same basic elements. Sometimes they work really well, and sometimes they don’t. I thought Downhill was just Will Ferrell in a skiing movie. But it’s actually one of his increasingly rare dramatic roles, insofar as he’s ever overly dramatic in his dramatic movies (which has actually made him refreshing as a comedian who sometimes does drama).

The only problem here is that Louis-Dreyfus comes off as a shrew because Ferrell feels more sympathetic. But that only emphasizes how awkward the whole situation is. If it were a matter of picking sides it would be more difficult. In the original movie the onus is more of the husband’s side, how he apparently obviously abandoned his family in the emergency. But so much emphasis is already on Ferrell before the (quasi)avalanche, and even how the ski resort doesn’t take the event seriously (the best scene of the movie), that it makes it that much harder to side with Louis-Dreyfus as she increasingly freaks out about it. And while Ferrell is not at all averse to showing his comedic instincts, Louis-Dreyfus is, making her even harder to root for.

But as much as I find myself siding with Ferrell, Louis-Dreyfus ends up giving him a generous opportunity to redeem himself, and then at the very last minute (this is how I currently interpret it) there’s a second moment of potential disaster, and it’s Louis-Dreyfus who pulls away....And cut straight to credits!

Even viewed as a Will Ferrell movie alone, Downhill is rewarding enough, but Faxon and Rash once again prove they have a winning formula, however unlikely it seems to be. Miranda Otto shows up in an equally unlikely supporting role, thereby somewhat proving that this is exactly how the movie is supposed to be received.

Stranger than Fiction

****

directed by: Marc Forster
starring: Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah

Released in 2006.

Will Ferrell is perhaps one of the more unlikely movie stars to emerge in the past ten years.  He's one of many comics to come from TV's Saturday Night Live, known for skits and characters.  Plenty of successful stars have come from SNL, but few of them have been able to sustain movie careers, and fewer still by basically keeping their SNL persona of inhabiting a new bizarre character with each movie appearance.  Ferrell rose to success with Elf and Anchorman, but he's managed to sustain his career by continuing much along the same lines.  When he deviates, he's less successful.  Usually when a comedic actor deviates, it's to try more serious material, as with Robin Williams and Jim Carrey.  Ferrell's Truman Show is called Stranger than Fiction, except it's very much Ferrell's version of the career move.  It's more surreal than real.

Essentially,  the movie is about Ferrell suddenly gaining a narrator in his life.  Now, clearly this is not something that happens in real life, unless someone has developed a psychological disorder.  That would be Ferrell's assumption as well, except he doesn't stop there.  He consults a literary expert (Dustin Hoffman), to figure out what the narration itself may signify given analysis.  Eventually Ferrell actually meets the writer who has been composing the narration (Emma Thompson).

The story also involves a romance for Ferrell (with Maggie Gyllenhaal), which is not something that typically happens in a serious way in a Will Ferrell movie.  Oddly, it is an undercurrent in a lot of his movies, but there it is.

It's Ferrell doing a Ferrell movie but in a completely different way.  Often in some of his smaller roles he's a character who is watching a greater story develop, reacting more than acting, but here it's Ferrell doing exactly that as the main character, and he plays the part to perfection, and it's a complete revelation.

For the other notable actors in the movie, I'll concentrate on Hoffman.  As celebrated as he was early in his career, Hoffman tends to be taken for granted these days, but I always find him fascinating.  He throws himself into all of his roles.  Someone else might have made this one a counterpoint to Ferrell's or even an outright skeptic, but Hoffman keeps the project firmly grounded in reality, where Thompson exists simply to give it the touch of class that people would either not have expected at all in a Will Ferrell movie, or what they would expect from one in which he's trying to be serious.  So it works both ways.

Stranger than Fiction isn't quite the triumph of The Truman Show, but it's certainly far more than a curiosity.  It will remain one of Ferrell's best movies probably for a long time to come, something to point to not just to demonstrate his range but what he can accomplish when he pushes his natural instincts to heir best and most unexpected limits.