Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Director Duncan Jones is an ideas guy. His breakthrough 2009 film Moon imagined a last-man-alive scenario where an isolated astronaut working a one-man job on the Moon discovers a clone of himself in the station with him. In 2011’s Source Code, Jake Gyllenhaal’s consciousness inhabits other people as he goes back in time to stop a bomb on a train. Even in 2016’s Warcraft, Jones brought more thoughtfulness to the video-game adaptation than the film likely deserved. With Mute, his latest film that premiered on Netflix today, Jones is once again bringing us a film that is wholly original; not a sequel, not a remake, not based on any kind of intellectual property, not even based on any kind of novel. Mute is something brand new, and it’s a credit to Jones that it still feels brand new even as it presents a collage of other films, influences, and styles.
Mute begins with a flashback of sorts, as a young Amish boy experiences a boating accident, and his family rushes him to the hospital where his life is saved, but any further modern medical procedures that might save his voice are deemed against tradition. Cut to a busy, bustling Berlin of the future, a consciously Blade Runner-esque cityscape where the grown-up and mute Leo works as a bartender and continues to eschew any kind of of modern technology. It’s a character quirk, yes, but it comes across as a problem-solving tactic more than anything. How do you deal with a mute character in a futuristic landscape where any number of modern gadgets from cell phones to electronic voice boxes might obviate any kind of inability to speak? Make him Amish! Leo’s girlfriend Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh) goes missing in the first act, and he spends the rest of the moving navigating a dark, dirty underworld to get to her. This particular plot driver is entirely too common to chalk up to a single influence, but I found myself imagining Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days a lot during Mute.
Blade Runner and Strange Days seem perfectly logical as influences for a modern sci-fi film. M*A*S*H, however, isn’t. But what else are we supposed to think about a pair of irreverent surgeons, played by Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux, who operate on a storyline running perpendicular to Leo’s. “Cactus” Bill (Rudd), sporting an Elliott Gould mustache that ought to have earned its SAG card for its performance, and Duck Teddington (Theroux) are old Afghanistan veterans working the underground bullet-removal circuit for any number of shady figures. Their vibe is also purposefully slippery throughout. Are they good or bad? Bad bad or just, like, scoundrels who we can root for? Or is Rudd a fun scoundrel but Theroux a bad dude? Are they legit gay for each other or just in a constant state of play-acting homoeroticism?
Honestly, I could linger on the issue of sexuality with these two for several long paragraphs. They appear to be co-habitating, enjoy a kind of physical intimacy (though they never so much as kiss), and they call each other “babe,” yet Cactus Bill freely uses “faggot” as an epithet and Duck is some kind of peeping pedophile with a taste for young girls. It’s all incredibly icky and leaves the impression that Jones queered up these characters to make them interesting/filthy, which would be disgusting if it were any clearer what he’s going for with these characters. They’re at once the film’s most compelling players and also the most frustrating. They’re about sixteen different agents-of-chaos beats without any kind of the work necessary to streamline them into actual people.
The universe these three men navigate reveals a kind of noir futurism, where everything is advanced but our attitudes. Prostitution is still a sleazy business, and the criminal underworld is still where you’ll find cross-dressing geishas into S&M and robot fornication (don’t ask) and female impersonators who know too much. That it’s Dominic Monaghan (Lost) under that geish and Robert Sheehan (Misfits) under that breastplate only adds to a sense of squandering the potential of the future by establishing the same kinds of noir hellscapes we’re used to seeing, where sexuality is pathologized as always, just this time under a neon sheen.
