Mountainhead: A Satire Lost In Its Own Signal

Mountainhead Teeters Between Being A Film About Insufferable People & Being Insufferable Itself

Jesse Armstrong's latest is a self-absorbed, pretentious and intermittently funny mess — a film so high on its cast and crew that it suffers from a case of the mediocrity munchies.
Rahul Desai writes.

SUCCCESSION creator Jesse Armstrong continues his skewer-the-rich obsession with a chamber setting in which one almost expects Jeremy Strong’s Kendall Roy to pop up with a flame gun and some cocaine. His latest, Mountainhead , is a bit like The White Lotus hooking up with Don’t Look Up : if the blindly privileged group of vacationing girlfriends were replaced by four white billionaires in the depths of Utah who may or may not represent the technocratic world order. And if their little dick-measuring contest were a nearly two-hour episode about a snowy weekend retreat (named after Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead of course) while the world burns around them.

The characters are so absurd that they’re supposed to be real. Venis (Cory Michael Smith) is the wealthiest human on the planet and the owner of a Twitter-coded social media platform spreading AI-generated deep fakes and misinformation that’s spreading chaos across continents. There’s tension and history between him and Jeff (Ramy Youssef), founder of a woke AI company that holds the ‘cure’ — a fact-checking technology that Venis needs to avoid the reversal of some controversial features he’s just added. Jeff, as the one with a conscience, keeps taunting him for starting genocides and wars everywhere, but it rarely amounts to much more than banter. Randall (Steve Carell) is the oldest: a mentor-like figure who asks his doctor to “do better” when told there’s no cure for his cancer. And there’s Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), the “poorest” of them all (nicknamed Souper), who hustles to pitch a lifestyle super-app to his friends.

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They’d like to believe that they’re just a gang of overgrown jocks meeting up for some luxurious downtime at Hugo’s holiday villa. But the escalating violence outside has them glued to their screens, scheming and cooking up grand plans of coups in South America and Europe. Every ego in there is the size of Russia, with Randall the most fragile, given that Jeff passes him in the richest-people list, and he needs Venis to do well so that he can find a cure to his disease. It’s a matter of time before these wildly power-drunk pals turn against each other.

I get the point — and the timing — of a satire like this. With Elon Musk and his wanton puppeteering of the White House, and several such industrialist-politician nexuses across the globe (a communally volatile Gujarat makes an appearance on news screens), Mountainhead is like a new-age, post-truth Veep — where the self-seriousness, emotional oblivion and intellectual masturbations of those in power become the source of dark comedy. It is of this moment while also being a precisely exaggerated version of it. Armstrong derives much of his cinema from the pitched-up apathy and parody-level sensibilities of these trigger-happy freaks. Their idea of a competitive hike, for instance, is to climb up a mountain and do this bizarrely masculine ritual where they scribble their net worths on their chests.

With Mountainhead , though, Armstrong doesn’t know where to stop. At some point, the eccentricities of the four feel too farcical and designed, as if to provoke the viewer into noticing how the vileness of the rich is normalised. The initially sharp writing descends into a repetitive loop of: "Look, they’re so casually evil and fun." The writer-director himself seems to cross over into this dangerous territory, almost as if he’s enjoying the delusions of the cringey men and their cringey super-villain energy. They're somewhere between being college kids with nuclear codes and spy-universe baddies sparring at their own personal convention. Watching them gets exhausting after the first hour, particularly because the film nurtures its humiliation kink by putting them in ‘abnormal’ situations. In a landscape where the eat-the-rich template is now stuck in an endless cycle of self-cannibalism, it’s difficult to appreciate the snappiness of this story.

In other words, Mountainhead is stranded in that awkward space between being a film about insufferable people and just being an insufferable film. The 108-minute feature feels considerably longer, given its tech-bro lingo and empty-machine-gun dialogue that sounds like an Aaron Sorkin script getting drunk at a Succession wrap party. The currentness of the premise is undone by its own desperation to outdo the real world; it’s almost as if it’s so insecure about the deep-set ironies of life that the fiction decides to overreact. The result is a self-absorbed, pretentious and intermittently funny mess — a film so high on its cast and crew that it suffers from a case of the mediocrity munchies.

Given our collective Succession withdrawals, it’s hard not to be hyped about the concept of Mountainhead . We are, after all, so used to seeing the death and destruction caused by greedy capitalist billionaires who we imagine as faceless cigar-smoking machines in mansions that it’s a culture shock to see those billionaires be exactly these cliches — with the death and destruction relegated to their background as white noise. Once the gimmick wears off, however, all that’s left is a movie that slowly mutates into the fifth guy at Mountainhead . Let’s call him Mo: the middle-aged mad billionaire who hosts this gang as a social experiment for a nameless nation-state, with cameras capturing their every move.

Mountainhead is currently streaming on JioHotstar.

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