In Rumors, Guy Maddin asks perhaps the least contested question of all time: what if our global leaders were bumbling, disorganized narcissists who wander aimlessly through nebulous crises that they don’t have the skills, let alone the interest, to solve? It’s a malleable sentiment that can be made to fit almost any political agenda, especially when its characters take no firm political stances of their own — at least, none that pertain to any tangible material reality.
This kind of apathetic, nonpartisan pandering is hardly ever compelling, but somehow Maddin manages to make the film revelatory by devolving into a stale tedium in service to his thesis. After Joker: Folie a Deux, it’s refreshing to see a film that knows it's wasting your time but does so as a means to an end.
Opening with the members of the G7 summit posing for a photo op with a decomposing corpse, Rumors hits the ground running with its satirical jabs. Its first act watches the politicians meander through the motions of addressing an unnamed global issue, treating the crisis as a piece of menial busy-work. The leaders are all abstracted caricatures of their real-world counterparts: there’s a controversy-ridden dreamboat of a Canadian prime minister (Roy Dupuis), a fading American president with (weirdly) an unmistakable British accent (Charles Dance), and Cate Blanchett even tries her hand at a cardboard Angela Merkle with a touch of Lady Di. But as the sun sets, a soapy, feverish fog rolls through the meadow they’ve been leisurely strolling through, and the leaders can’t seem to find their way back to civilization.
The rest of the film unfolds at a dream-like, meandering pace. Sporadic conflicts never really manifest themselves as tangible threats: perhaps because Rumors doesn’t care for its characters enough to let us be troubled by their defeat, but mostly because each problem is either off-the-deep-end absurd or so completely dull that only the most inept protagonists would ever struggle to solve it. The leaders are oddly unfazed by a giant, pulsating human brain in the middle of the woods, but crossing a river poses a challenge because they only know how to swim backwards. They brush off a horde of masturbating, exploding zombies, but can’t recognize gibberish incantations as simply the Swedish language.
It’s in these odd, episodic fever dreams that Rumors really finds its footing, but despite its absurd wit, the film struggles to say anything particularly abrasive. It spends most of its runtime wandering through a weird satirical purgatory, with its neon psychedelia rendered as strangely pedestrian when played against its generic satirical digs.
It’s strange, then, how this cartoonish and apocalyptic nightmare feels somewhat sedate. Every distorted conflict never shocks and the wooden emotions of the film's all-star ensemble render the film oddly unprovocative. Despite the increasing absurdity, Rumors shows no real movement. There’s simply nothing to be said. No elaboration on its own points, no conclusions to its own arguments, and no punchlines to its own jokes — just aimless, circular wandering as the world decays. Which perhaps is the point.
OVERALL SCORE: 6/10
Rumors was released on October 18, 2024, and is currently showing in US theaters.
I didn't do anything?