Another Surprising Movie Review from David Walsh (of Yorgos Lanthimos Poor Things)

Reading about Poor Things in advance of the film's debut I expected a piece of postmodernist tripe. This is all the more in as it comes from Yorgos Lanthimos, director of such films as The Lobster, and The Favourite, aptly characterized by David Walsh as "marked by an overall chilly and self-conscious idiosyncrasy, and occasional misanthropy"--in the case of The Lobster a "facile misanthropy" that Walsh recognizes all too correctly as "one of the 'default settings'" of "independent" film.

The result is that I was very surprised to see Walsh present a very positive review of the movie as not only technically accomplished in respects or having the benefit of good performances (though he does praise both aspects of the film), but as a work which is humane in sensibility and socially critical in a meaningful way.

This is the second time in the space of about half a year that Walsh has surprised me with a favorable review of a major director of whose work he had been consistently very critical in the past--and indeed praised for eschewing the cheap irony and misanthropy that have been dominant since at least the '90s to take on serious subjects, seriously. (The other director he praised on such grounds was Christopher Nolan, whose Oppenheimer Walsh praised very highly.)

Considering this I find myself thinking of how many times we have heard about the "end of irony" these past several decades. Could the changing attitudes of filmmakers like Lanthimos and Nolan be a sign that we are really moving past that, perhaps because the world really is in a bad way, and the irony with which a certain kind of pseudo-intellectual has long blown off the fact has lost the last of whatever credibility it ever had for all save the truly, incurably, "ironic?" And that filmmakers (perhaps, along with many, many others) are really and truly starting to abandon the vanity, smugness, irresponsibility that are the great attractions of the ironic stance in favor of actual engagement with the world--and in doing so going after "bigger game" than the kind of subject matter so compelling to (to name but one example) the Gerwig loyalists? I reserve judgment about that for now--but it is something to watch for in the years ahead.