There’s a mildly amusing on-paper joke at the centre of manic art world comedy The Gallerist: what if someone was accidentally impaled on an exhibit but rather than report it, the corpse became part of the artwork?
Sure, poking fun at the absurdity of modern art might seem a little dated and definitely a little too easy but maybe with a packed cast including Oscar winners Natalie Portman, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, there could be a fun, fast-paced caper here? The answer is a depressing nope, the film a pained and grating misfire played like Weekend at Bernie’s for MoMA members that’s not funny or smart enough to work as farce or satire.
It’s the latest from writer-director Cathy Yan, who was at Sundance in 2018 with Dead Pigs, a colourful, poppy Shanghai-set ensemble comedy drama that was vibrant and commercial enough to get her a DC gig, making the most of Harley Quinn spin-off Birds of Prey. The Gallerist is her inevitable next step, a combination of one for them and one for herself, a star-studded dark comedy that, during her introduction before the Sundance premiere, she jokes she didn’t have to edit in her living room. But it’s a major stumble, limply aiming at low-hanging fruit (isn’t the art world kinda dopey?) and wasting a cast who could and should be having more fun.
I’m always a fan of Portman’s big swings, more recently nestled next to her thankless Marvel work, but she can’t seem to find her footing here, playing ambitious and morally disintegrating gallerist Polina, styled like a cross between Miranda Priestly and Andy Warhol. She’s hoping her new exhibition, unveiling during Art Basel’s Miami edition, will nudge her further from snobbish judgment (she’s known to have gained her money via ex-husband and “canned tuna king” Tom, played by Sterling K Brown) and towards the acclaim she desperately hungers for. She’s showcasing the work of relative unknown Stella (Randolph) whose work is maligned by obnoxious art influencer Dalton (Zach Galifianakis) during an early viewing. After a vicious exchange, Dalton accidentally slips on a pool of leaking air conditioner water and impales himself on Stella’s centrepiece. Polina then goes through the natural stages of grief – repulsion, pleasure, fear and finally, after a montage of dead bodies used in art flashes through her head, creativity. What if this was made to look intentional?
What follows is a scramble to both attract attention to the piece but draw it away from the truth and Polina recruits assistant Kiki (Jenna Ortega) to help with her scheme. A wacky assortment of characters proceed to enter the gallery as the hype builds, from a fresh-out-of-prison art maven (Zeta-Jones) to a trashy party boy (Daniel Brühl) to Dalton’s suspicious younger girlfriend (Charli xcx).
Yan tries to forcefully sweep us up in the unfolding mayhem, energetically swirling her camera around the clinically bright and entirely artificial gallery, and keeping things aggressively paced (like many a Sundance film, it’s around the 90-minute mark) but the film just never clicks into place. What should be wickedly cutting in-the-know dialogue is soft and uninventive, what should be a seat-edge string of escalating circumstances becomes increasingly tiring and hard-to-buy and while the cast is game, they mostly struggle to find the right level for Yan’s admittedly difficult-to-match zany energy. Zeta-Jones is all vamped up with nowhere to go and nothing juicy enough to say while Ortega is clearly trying but feels like she’s often acting without direction. The big disappointment is Portman who just never feels comfortable in her character, unsure of how big she should go in certain scenes and unable to even master her character’s physicality, the whole performance feeling like a strain. It’s not that Portman can’t do comedy (I even found her to be funny in fuck buddy rom-com No Strings Attached) but she’s completely rudderless here.
The art industry potshots might be lazy but Yan does give us a glimmer of something more probing and perhaps more personal. There’s commentary on the uneasy wrestle between art and commerce with Stella uncomfortable with producing her own raw piece of art that’s then cheapened by Polina’s tacky antics. Predictably in this attention economy, those very antics suddenly bring in more money and fame for Stella but then her art is no longer her own. I wondered if maybe Yan was referencing her time working with DC, what we can only imagine would be a rough process for many an artist and I wished the film had been more focused on Stella than Polina. A final monologue tries to add weight to a film that’s mostly been feather-light but Stella is a character too underwritten to matter to us, a shame for Randolph who still deserves more since her Holdovers Oscar win.
We all deserve more from The Gallerist though, a talented cast put to waste and a director freed from the shackles of superhero cinema not finding her way back to the real world. This one is dead on arrival.
The Gallerist is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
