Fantasia Festival ’19: The Art of Self-Defense

**/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Alessandro Nivola, Imogen Poots, Steve Terada
written and directed by Riley Stearns

Fantasia Festival 2019 runs July 11-August 1 in Montreal, Quebec. Visit the fest’s official site for more details.

by Walter Chaw Riley Stearns’s The Art of Self-Defense is the easier-to-digest version of a Yorgos Lanthimos film, but only star Jesse Eisenberg knows it. He’s in The Lobster; everyone else is in an ironic-slopping-over-into-arch indie exercise that presents toxic masculinity and rape culture as something with a potentially upbeat outcome. It’s a fairy tale, in other words–the kind sanitized for your protection, although the occasional flashes of ultra-violence suggest that it was something darker in an earlier conception. What remains is a sometimes mordantly funny social satire that loses first its steam in its middle section (when a post-workout massage doesn’t pull the trigger it should have pulled), then its nerve with a resolution that actually feels pandering and weak-willed. The picture wants very much to console, yet there’s no consolation. I guess the real lesson learned is that the temperature of the room isn’t real interested in hearing how everything’s going to be all right. The key moment left hanging is a confrontation in a parking lot with a random dude who slaps a bag of groceries out of our hero’s hands. It’s aggression from nothing, humiliating for a character we’ve come to like, and evocative of a greater world outside where it’s already too late: The monkeys run the monkey house, and they’re rabid and hungry. Manufacturing a happy ending from this mess is insulting.

An accountant working out of a cubicle, Casey (Eisenberg) can’t get along with his co-workers and lives alone with his little dog. He’s mugged one night and tries to buy a gun but is thwarted by the waiting period, and then he stumbles into a karate dojo run by an unnamed Sensei (Alessandro Nivola). We do learn his name eventually, but as it’s the punchline to a running gag I’ll leave it be. I will say, though, that it’s part of the film’s only gag, which is that masculinity is both completely ridiculous and the single greatest blight on our society. Casey starts learning karate and taking a sort of cursory interest in fellow student/instructor Anna (Imogen Poots), who has, according to a stripe on her belt, killed someone in hand-to-hand combat. The idea of belts as a measure of male potency is another recurring joke (see above), as is the obvious psychopathic violence of Sensei and the obvious lack of the same from Casey. After listening to death metal for a while and learning German, Casey does a bit of Fight Club insouciance in the office, earning him a seat at his co-workers’ table for the very first time–but, again, the film fails to honour its own premise by not elevating Casey to an office “alpha” allowed to do whatever he wants however he wants. The best example of this played well is Mike Nichols’s Wolf, a movie that ultimately fails in the same way The Art of Self-Defense fails, but at least has that scene where the mild-mannered schlub played by Jack Nicholson pisses on the shoes of his arch-nemesis. When The Art of Self-Defense doesn’t reward Casey’s violence, it says that perhaps all this concern about the patriarchy is overstated. Maybe he’s simply doing it wrong.

The better version of all this is David Fincher’s other wallow in the territory of fragile male egos, The Social Network–or, you know, the saga of every major corporation in the United States. (Its government, too.) Anna tells a horrifying story of rape and revenge and her inability to penetrate the dojo’s glass ceiling, and her reward is a blackbelt, an honour she’s coveted, conferred on her by…Casey? His ultimate triumph seems at the expense of Anna’s eventual triumph: she’s just traded one guy for another. Stearns gives Anna the moral weight of the piece only to have her beat the ever-loving crap out of a rival, Brad Pitt-on-Jared Leto-in-Fight Club-style. Too, he gives her a long monologue in the end about the possibility for strength through peace and relegates Casey to teaching karate to children, as though these acts are restorative rather than palliative. There’s hope in The Art of Self-Defense instead of dire warning. Where Lanthimos’s films hit these same targets with deadly efficiency, Stearns’s film badly undershoots. It’s so superior to the topic and its characters–and, let’s face it, making fun of bros isn’t exactly a tough assignment–that its condescension overflows onto the audience. If it didn’t want so much to be liked, it’d be more successful. There’s a lesson for everyone in that. Fantasia Festival 2019 – Programme: Selection 2019