Director: Hailey Gates
Writer: Hailey Gates
Stars: Alia Shawkat, Chloe East, Channing Tatum
Synopsis: Follows an aspiring actress working on a U.S. military base that simulates an Iraqi war zone.
If one were to write a book titled “How to Win the Sundance Dramatic Grand Jury Prize For Dummies,” chapter one would have to be called “The Easy Route.” It’s the path Robert Frost may not advise the ambitious to traverse, but its success rate speaks for itself. One could go for the emotional jugular, a la 2016’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, 2020’s Minari, or 2021’s eventual Best Picture-winning CODA; those willing to take a bigger leap could do the most, as they say, like Damien Chazelle with 2014’s Whiplash; or, you might prefer the controversial route, in the spirit of Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation, which placed a brutal rape scene at its core, an element that went on to spark debate after the director himself was accused of raping a college classmate in 1999. Of course, that news was reported long after the film premiered and was subsequently heralded out of Sundance, but it wasn’t just Parker’s crime that flooded it with detractors and, to use a more colloquial term, “haters” once it temporarily garnered awards buzz before petering out of the race entirely. That credit goes to the film itself for feeling like a desperate attempt for a young filmmaker to make a superhero film about the United States’ history of slavery, as well as a self-important work made by a man with a broad scope yet a limited grasp of the material itself.
Hailey Gates’ debut feature Atropia – the latest movie to take home the festival’s top prize – has about as little in common with The Birth of a Nation as Minari does with Blood Simple, the Coen Brothers’ film that took home Grand Jury honors in 1985. Yet it feels like the sort of film that paved its own path to early-year festival glory by way of its wit, its ideas, and its many, many cameos, too. The key word there, though, is “ideas,” as that’s what most of Atropia amounts to, a collection that fuels the under-developed nature of Gates’ satire without serving it at full capacity. Occasionally, that’s a fine state for a debut to operate in, but given the access that Gates – most recently seen in Challengers playing the only one of Patrick Zweig’s many Tinder dates that we get to see in person – has to a number of A-and-B-listers, the material needs to be stronger. Otherwise, we’re stuck staring at 102 minutes of window dressing; a handsome, hollow one at that.
Then again, that’s a fitting idea for a movie that is trying to be a cutting satire of our nation’s ridiculous military spending habits when it’s far more effective at being about the pains one will go to in order to break free of the obscurity that background players in Hollywood are often saddled with. In this case, the central extra is Fayruz (Alia Shawkat), a struggling actress whose willingness to take a job as a simulation participant at the titular military training base in post-9/11 Southern California. When she isn’t toggling back and forth between playing a street vendor and a mustard gas scientist – the latter being a more pivotal role in the Army’s production of “Kidnap the Person Who May or May Not Be Making the Bomb II” – she’s coaching her fellow end-credit dwellers to go the extra mile, despite the fact that most of them are perfectly content with garnering a quick pay day on the outskirts of Hollywood, regardless of these simulations running 24/7 in order to properly mimic war. The same sort of zany extroversion that made her too-brief role in Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice last year a disappointing loss in a bumbling thriller is front and center here, particularly when [redacted] shows up to join the action in preparation for their next real Hollywood production.
Fayruz knew that [redacted] was bound to show up on set eventually, as she’d heard rumblings of their appearance and prepared accordingly, asking for a bigger part of bringing a bit of unwelcome improvisation to her takes in the hopes of standing out. What she didn’t expect was the arrival of Abu Dice (Callum Turner), a handsome soldier tasked with playing an Atropian insurgent, though his presence feels blatantly designed to destabilize Fayruz’s otherwise eager beaver attitude to do anything for a better part. Their inevitable romantic liaison becomes the film’s primary focus, dragging down … That it was added to the story at Shawkat’s request is even more frustrating, given how excellent she is before, during, and after its introduction. It makes you wish that the film had committed harder to its satirical ambitions, affording her the opportunity to continue reveling in an individual showcase as opposed to being the vessel through which this toothless satire is delivered.
Simply put, Atropia is just a bit too obvious for its own good, naming its fake news channels “Box News” and “Al Jazzer,” done to provide the base with an authentic feel despite being narrative moves that feel lateral, if not throwaway, much like most of Gates’ script’s should’ve-been-funny lines. That aforementioned wit comes in fits and starts, primarily when Tim Heidecker and Chloë Sevigny show up for a combined 90 seconds of screen time to tell an amputee that they can’t cast her in this production due to the risk that she will be re-traumatized, the burden she’s carried since losing half of her right arm in Iraq representing a hurdle for their project that is best walked around as opposed to lept over. The same goes for its most satirical material, cutting observations like “Think of it as like a really expensive game of laser tag” and the very real fact that these military bases were built on the promise they represented to Hollywood, another attempted (and frequently successful) cash grab on the part of the Department of Defense.
But it bears reiterating that we knew that already, and it doesn’t seem that Gates necessarily cares to delve further beyond what is already understood as opposed to continuing to tread on sandy ground, not so much following in the footsteps of more pioneering works but taking the exact same steps that they paved before. It’s a crying shame that Gates never got to shoot the documentary she originally intended Atropia to be, due to the government’s restriction on access to the materials that film would have required, not just because it almost certainly would’ve been a better movie than this one, but because of how little interest in mining its own fictional revelations the one she did make actually is. Shawkat’s natural charisma and Turner’s blinding beauty aside, there’s nothing to gnaw on here that hasn’t already been sampled, chewed up, and spit back out for the dogs to snack on later. On paper, it might have looked like a howler. In practice, it’s a joke with a punchline that could have been delivered with brevity, and is instead drawn out over close to two hours. By the end, all we’re left to do is nod, acknowledge that we got the picture, and wish the film had realized it as soon as we did.
