Director: Karim Ainouz
Writer: Efthimis Filippou
Stars: Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Elle Fanning, Jamie Bell, Tracy Letts, Pamela Anderson
Synopsis: In a Spanish villa, American siblings Jack, Ed, Anna and Robert wallow in isolation and their inherited fortune. When Jack wants to move in with his girlfriend and Ed uncovers the truth about their mother’s death, the fabric of the family begins to unravel.
Have you ever had the pleasure of eating the rich? Few have actually enjoyed the experience of turning a now-colloquial desire for economic equilibrium into a legitimate feast, but by golly, the concept hasn’t turned filmmakers off from trying their hand at dramatizing the affair. Occasionally, they do so by adapting a 1946 Alec Guinness vehicle into a serviceable but forgettable flop, dumped by its distributor in the recesses of February. Or, perhaps it manifests in a revenge thriller pulled from truth, one put to screen mere months before that film’s distributor crumbles under the weight of its own ambitions. But those films – two of the most recent examples in a long line of films within these “genre” confines with eyes larger than their stomachs – weren’t nearly ambitious enough.
At least, that’s what it seems the Brazilian director Karim Ainouz and his screenwriter Efthimis Filippou (a frequent collaborator of Yorgos Lanthimos’, most notably on The Lobster) felt when they elected to pull inspiration from Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 satire Fists in the Pocket in order to make Rosebush Pruning, a tale of retribution that claims to be a spin on its inspiration(s) but is nothing more than a retread. “Bringing vengeance?” one asks, to which Ainouz and his collaborators reply, “Bringing nothing at all.”
Ah, that’s unfair. The siblings in this yarn of familial flatulence are played by Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, and Lukas Gage, a respectable group of actors that appear to be having fun, if little else. But to frolic in such extravagance shouldn’t require such exertion, a fault more of Ainouz’s sleepy direction than Filippou’s screenplay, though said script is also riddled with throwaway lines that patronize the audience and provide its performers with inert exposition in one fell swoop. “People are roses. Families are rosebushes. Rosebushes need pruning,” Turner’s Ed rattles off within the first few minutes of the film, simultaneously managing to tell us exactly what’s bound to happen over the next 95 minutes and delivering an empty promise only a better film could have hoped to keep.
“How do you like my new watch?” Father (Tracy Letts) asks at dinner, followed quickly by a demand for Jack (Jamie Bell) to check what time it is by, indeed, looking at his new watch. Father is blind, so the watch is there for show. It’s a fitting, if on the nose metaphor, for the lives of these billionaire characters and the rest of their trappings – from the family’s expansive Spanish villa, where they moved due to their mother’s love for the architect and their realization that Balenciaga wasn’t born in New York – to the garish tone in which they speak to one another, performative and amiss alike.
At this same early meal, Robert (Lukas Gage) openly pines for Jack, his eldest sibling, urging the rest of his sight-bearing kin to ogle at how sexy Big Bro has been looking lately; Jack teases the arrival of his new girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning); Anna (Riley Keough) broods and smirks all but silently, not offering so much as a “tsk tsk” when her father asks if Martha is as hot as his daughter, the same daughter who also wants to sleep with Jack; Ed, meanwhile, contemplates his next move. It’s worth pondering the moves he’s made already, those we haven’t seen, but are meant to feel some type of way about.
A film can only tell without showing so much before it becomes grating, and it’s not five minutes into Ainouz’s second English-language effort – following 2023’s handsome but flawed Firebrand – that you can feel the seams coming undone. Or maybe you’re doing that dirty work yourself, desperate to feel something given how little the film thinks of you, its viewer, forcefeeding you empty spoonfuls of muted diatribes from angry siblings whose mission statements might as well be tattooed to their foreheads. They want to one-up one another, but Rosebush Pruning doesn’t care to give its actors any room to find their respective footings in that regard, a shame considering how individually talented most of the ensemble is, or how promising they’ve shown themselves to be in their previous work. Turner is meant to be a mysterious lead here, but it’s clear that Ainouz missed Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada, a labyrinth of a film in which Turner is as difficult to read as the picture itself. (And all the more tremendous for it.)
Bell, Fanning, Keough, and Letts have all had their fair share of stellar supporting turns in the past, so it’s devastating to watch Ainouz become so restless as to direct attention elsewhere the moment their scenes start becoming interesting. They are recognizable faces in a faceless film, relegated to bit players when they could have been front and center if not for their steward’s penchant for the “Look! Over there!” fakeout. If nothing else, it’s nice that they appear in Rosebush Pruning as their presences serve as reminders of their careers, those that will go on successfully with this work appearing as but a blip on their curriculum vitaes. Watch literally anything else they’ve done instead.
Rosebush Pruning is now available to stream on Mubi and VOD.
