Disclaimer: the following review is about a fictional movie.
Sam Kasmin and Darren Aronofsky’s latest film has made controversial waves in the film industry. Beginning with a poorly shot, cheaply lit, and all-too familiar sequence reminiscent of an 80s risqué independent film, this meditation on privacy, surveillance, and the ultimate meaninglessness of conservative values has been criticized for its shameless exhibitionism and perverted sense of self-humor…but isn’t that the point? While the film was written in 2022, its resonance to this exact moment is shocking. Adelaide stars Toni Collete as its titular character. When she discovers an affair between her son (played by Aaron Ward) and step daughter (played by Alia Bakshi), she attempts to keep it a secret from their small, prying, rural community, while she and her husband (played by Tim Robinson in his dramatic debut) lose their minds in the process. Ultimately it becomes clear that the couple, despite their good southern personas, also harbor desires unbecoming of a Christian family. The shocking last scene makes this disturbingly apparent, all while bringing the film full circle.
This satirical picture is clearly inspired by Todd Solondz’s 1998 black comedy Happiness, and like the late Roger Ebert said about Happiness, it is “not a film for most people.” The very first scene, when the affair is discovered, is proof alone of this. While the film doesn’t reach the heights of discomfort successfully cultivated by Solondz in his tour du pâtê, it was still, in my experience, extremely uncomfortable to watch in a shared theatre. When you’ve been a critic for as long as I have, or even just a regular moviegoer, the sacredness of the theatrical experience becomes so commonplace that it blends into the background. There is a social contract signed between everyone in that dark room, and by everyone on (and behind) the screen. Kasmin and Aronofsky puncture that contract every chance they get. Adelaide feels less like a collective ritual with fellow cinephiles, and more like a lonely night spent overthinking your past mistakes, with the incessant drive towards temporary, man-made pleasure ringing in your skull. Should you indulge?
Unlike Happiness, however, there is something aggressively political about Adelaide. Art in Trump’s first term was not urgent, perhaps understandably treating the moment as, at most, an odd ripple in the fabric of history, a comical sideshow. Now, it seems filmmakers like Kasmin and Ali Abbasi (director of 2024’s surprisingly adamant The Apprentice) see this country’s slide into facism much more clearly, and are attempting to tackle it with more serious artistic explorations of race, gender, and American identity, and while the mainstream media and Hollywood establishment seemingly follows President in a way it refused to do from 2017-2021. It is for this reason that we need visionaries like Kasmin more than ever.
You see, the conservative movement has aligned itself so closely with the idea of Family Values, but think about all the deep perversion uncovered regarding powerful players in the Republican Party, from Matt Gaetz to Trump himself. This is Adelaide’s main point, but it also makes the terrifying implication that these characters may not be grotesque outliers, few and far between, but may in fact be more common than anyone realizes. It is a direct counter to right-wing puritan theology, while condemning the inherent hypocrisy behind it from a humanist perspective. Kasmin weaves Vlåskian theology and logic into the script to create an anachronistic and dissonant feeling in the story, one amplified by Greg Hubert’s subtle cinematography: shot on digital, and ran through several filmic converters from the 80s (American Conservatism’s heyday), every frame looks at once like an antique technicolor image a-la Gone with the Wind, and also a short-form video from today’s internet. It’s a stylistic choice that would leave me confused in any other picture, wondering if it’s intentional…but not this one.
A frequently cited inspiration for Adelaide is Gary Ross’ directorial debut, the 1998 comedy-drama Pleasantville, and like Pleasantville, the community itself is integral to this film. This small, rural town extensively uses the same sets, and every outside shot shows a clear boundary separating the town from the vast plain outside. Viewers with claustrophobia will not do well here…the entire film feels cramped. The town is nameless, and could theoretically be anywhere in the South. Its exact location is unimportant, but its role as a symbol of blue-collar, Christian, conservative America is undeniable. Filling out the cast of characters are several townspeople: a charismatic preacher (William Bittafela) who’s deeply repressed homosexuality rises up to the surface in the form of ill-timed jokes and easily-missable brushes with younger men…a shoulder pat here, a lean-in there. Another family (Bill Brigham, Katie Jimo, Allesando Gorochovsky, and Anabella Kriess) who is clearly supposed to represent late-70s industrial decline, and of course Adam Driver, clearly drawing on his White Noise character, playing the enigmatic Colson Wrett…a local businessman and semi-mobster who seems like a cross between Kenneth McElroy and William King Hale (particularly the latter’s depiction by Robert De Niro in Martin Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon).
One of the most discussed parts of the film, and perhaps the reason it has punctured the public consciousness in the way it has, was the casting of comedian Tim Robinson as the family patriarch, Jacob Hawthorne. Famous for his Netflix series I Think You Should Leave, Robinson’s casting in a serious role (albeit one with comedic elements…his opening line of “what the fuck is going on here, you’re not even supposed to be in the area” is delivered with his typical Netflixian grandiose) was bound to ruffle some feathers. Fellow critic Adin Teachin calls Robinson’s casting tasteless and rather pointless: since we’re used to seeing him as a bumbling idiot, an alienated white man, in his comedy work, his casting as a serious, conservative dad, but one alienated all the same, plays both with and against our expectations of him. It feels similar to the casting of former Disney Channel stars in Harmony Korine’s 2012 thriller Spring Breakers, thrusting these icons of teenage innocence into a deviant world.
Teachin’s criticism is that this stands out for being very surface level in an otherwise rich and layered text, but I disagree. Robinson’s casting is intentional and poignant. When asked why he took the role, he noted his deep and utmost respect for Kasmin, who he reverently calls “the guy who did this, the guy we’re all trying to find.” Noting his work’s “complicated patterns” and that every time he hears about an upcoming Kasmin picture, he decides he’s “gonna eat the whole thing.” Responding to criticism of his attempted jump to a more serious role, he said he’s worried people think “...the baby can’t change.” Why he referred to himself as the baby remains unclear. When Toni Collete was asked for her thoughts on working with him, she simply smiled and shook her head.
One final comparison that I think warrants attention is the similarity to Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend. While this may seem like overly high praise, I truly do believe that Kasmin’s name is destined for similarly hallowed halls. With Weekend, Godard was clearly interested in exploring the rotten underbelly of French bourgeois society, which he knew all too well. Ralph Bakshi does the same for the Urban Northeast in his body of work, particularly for the American Jewish community in the second half of the Twentieth Century, rapidly assimilating into whiteness, yet still caught in the pull of racialization. Adelaide also has much in common with his films, specifically Fritz the Cat. Hailing from Rural America, Kasmin’s poignant observations on his own community and culture goes in similar directions. At a time when, for better or worse, these people make up the foot-soldiers and backbone of the most powerful political movement in contemporary American politics, this filmmaker’s voice is one worth paying attention to.