‘Rumours’ review: ‘Veep’ this is not

Blame Canada for Rumours, an alleged comedy where a star-studded ensemble cast outnumber the actual laughs that you’ll emit.

The leaders of the G7, an annual political and economic conference held at a chateau in Dankerode, Germany, hunker down to draft a provisional statement of an unspecified international crisis in Rumours. Instead, like actors in a soap opera, they are more absorbed with the melodrama between them, so it takes them awhile to notice there are no other people around, and the recently unearthed bog men are now animated and roaming the surrounding area. Will these leaders get it together or will the crisis consume the world?

If you prefer satire from the HBO television series Veep, then Rumours is not for you. Do not expect a movie that’s incisive, resembles real life and/or uses horror metaphors in a resonant, evocative, and metaphorical way to highlight real life issues. Instead, expect a movie that explains the joke periodically, so movie goers do not lose the thread if they are able to stay awake and alert enough to get through the slog.

Cate Blanchett is having a rough year. First, she led a box office failure with the oft-delayed, studio mutilated Borderlands, and now is billed as if she is the lead in this film, but it is just to get butts in seats. Though styled as such, Blanchett’s German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann is not an exaggerated riff on former Chancellor Angela Merkel, a science nerd who visibly cringed at being touched. Nope, the fictional world lead is a former actor turned host of the G7 summit who is more sexual in a campy way that may have worked in the hands of better filmmakers such as Todd Haynes of May December fame and the karmic justice behind Joaquin Phoenix’s failure in Joker: Folie a Deux.

Blanchett’s accent shakes, and at times, sounds French, but her line deliveries rock, and eventually she finds a balance between playing it straight and going for laughs. She gets saddled with some hack humor, going for the low hanging fruit that Germans are inherently xenophobic and problematic. Someone needs to call comedic genius Kate McKinnon because Blanchett and Germans deserve better material. 

Like United Kingdom Prime Minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who’s most defining feature is using a laptop, the German chancellor exists to act like a studious schoolgirl with a naughty, boy-crazy streak. Both ladies are more obsessed with their dalliances with Canadian Prime Minister Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), who is the image of brooding turbulent virility. The Bechdel test is straining at the seams with this movie. It is a shame that codirectors and cowriters Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson have a blank check to ridicule women leaders in a way that is not misogynistic and mean-spirited, but the best that they could come up with was making them love interests. Boooooo!

Maxime is the real protagonist, and if there was truth in advertising, maybe the right audience would be attracted to Rumours. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may be the fairest of them all in a world leader beauty pageant, Dupuis would run laps around him. His appearance functions as a barometer for his emotional state. The man bun and tie are his half-hearted concessions to professionalism, which he lets down and takes off respectively before the first act ends. He consumes copious amounts of wine to drown his sorrows without getting tipsy.

When the crisis begins, he is the only one physically ready for the challenge and carries one of the leaders to relative safety a la Wonder Woman. While caricature is an essential part of humor, it is supposed to exaggerate known common features of a public figure. Maybe in Canada, this image of a lovelorn, playboy Harlequin cover of a prime minister is hilarious, but the average American may just be baffled and trying to find their footing. 

Unfortunately, the Japanese Prime Minister Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira) lacks depth, a real waste of Hira’s talents. Denis Ménochet, who plays French President Sylvain Broulez, fares better before relegated to the sidelines. Aside from that, Sylvain remains the best written character in the bunch. He depicts his account of retrieving papers as a classic black and white horror film, with Sylvain as the brilliant star, showcasing his delusions of grandeur. However, he’s just as much of an unfocused goofball as the others, who are all incapable of writing a memorable, historical document that would be quoted in the future.

If wasting Charles Dance is a crime, the filmmakers of Rumours would get the death penalty. If they were not afraid of defense arguments made in bad taste, they could claim that it was the most realistic political depiction and their POTUS was Sleepy Joe, but if they are smart, they would not want to share a Venn diagram with Presidon’t supporters.

Dance does not change his accent, a quick joke made too late in the proceedings, failing to ameliorate the distraction of his iconic voice. In an unexpected development, Italian Prime Minister Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello) is the most likeable character. He is not attached to his cell phone, actually cares about others’ well-being, and most importantly, has a reliable stockpile of cured meats. Unlike reality show contestants, he is there to make friends and is a complete sweetie pie. He is so likeable that it is easy to forget that he is supposed to be a broad archetype and start thinking of him as a person. 

What do these individual characters tell the audience about the nations they are from and the way they perform on the world stage? Other than POTUS, who mumbles military secrets in his sleep, not much. Other than the setting and the costumes, there is nothing about these characters that make them emblematic of the state of their respective societies, neoliberaliam, or international politics.

For those who would prefer a more generous interpretation of Rumours, here you go. It is not that everyone disappeared. So deluded and privileged they are they render themselves isolated and irrelevant. Comparisons to Night of the Living Dead are sure to disappoint. These seven people are just contemporary bog men, the living dead, with no real backbone, jerking off to the sound of their own voices and self-importance while the world is burning around them. Their audience is not the world, but each other. Film theory is fun, but this movie is not. The lemon is not worth the squeeze. Could the point hold in a shorter run time and still entertain? Apparently not. 

The exception may be Secretary General Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander) of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. She once fit in with the group but has since become a zealot devoted to an enormous brain in the middle of the woods, which makes her unintelligible to the others. Her devotion to the intellectual (i.e. scientific), and removal from the body, earthiness, baseness of humanity, renders her unrelatable. Common criticisms about the European Union can be gleaned from this portrait, but it is so brief that it is almost forgettable. Oddly enough, the filmmakers seem to favor a flawed useless politician over a sincere, raving brainiac, and Rumours may be the only anti-Swedish bastion in the world so points for originality.

While most of us are lusting over their social services, the filmmakers just equate their leadership as a sci-fi nightmare of self-destruction like complicit collaborators in an alien invasion. For the filmmakers’ fans, Rumours may be your cup of tea while simultaneously not being the best entry point into their body of work.