Like women for Captain Grimes, musicals are an enigma to me. When I wrote a column admitting I couldn’t bear them, good or bad, the responses included death threats and accusations of anti-Semitism. What particularly enraged these musical fans was a suggestion that they wanted to be pumped up with emotion, lacking much interior life of their own.
Joshua Oppenheimer is the writer, director and producer of The End – a musical set 20 years after environmental apocalypse, in a lavishly appointed bunker hidden in a salt mine. He has a more complicated relationship to musicals: he loves them as well as loathes them. As Oppenheimer explained to the Guardian: “As a kid, there was a divorce in my family. My world was shattered apart and so I used to spend time with my grandfather and we’d take the train to New York. He loved musicals and we’d always go and sing along. As an eight-year-old, I loved it. The music was this little, safe bubble for me. But then later you realise that this sentimentality is fundamentally escapist and that the consequence of all this escapism is catastrophe.” For him, now, musicals are about delusion.
Oppenheimer is best known for two tremendous documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). Both are about the massacre of a million people in Indonesia in the 1960s, in an anti-communist purge by the military. The first film portrayed the perpetrators, the second the victims and bereaved. Oppenheimer found that the killers were not only proud of their actions but, as Hollywood fans, eager to act them out for the camera, showing exactly how skilfully they strangled people with wire attached to a post, for example. The Act of Killing culminated in the most grotesque musical number ever, “Born Free”. Capering in front of a waterfall, the victims, casting off the wires with which they were killed, pin a medal on their executioner, playing himself in priestly robes, and thank him a thousand times for sending them to heaven.
Most grotesque until now, perhaps. Oppenheimer was inspired to make The End by a visit to the immense survivalist bunker of a Russian oligarch; he wished he could make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about what their life would be like 25 years after they had retreated to it. This is what he mocks up here.
The Man of the family (none of them named, so they can represent us all) is played by Michael Shannon, the Woman by Tilda Swinton, the Boy by George McKay. They live, with a few domestics, in huge rooms, decorated with valuable paintings (Renoirs, romantic “American luminism” landscapes) and many mirrors, which they constantly rearrange and redecorate.
Boy loves constructing dioramas of such scenes as the Pacific Railway, Woman reminisces about having been a ballerina with the Bolshoi. Man is concoctinga self-justifying memoir about his exploits as an energy tycoon in developing countries which led directly to the environmental catastrophe that has laid waste to the entire planet. “Drilling for oil was just my excuse for wind farms, clean water, save the chimpanzees,” he dictates. Into this repetitive, closed world comes the first outsider for a long time, Girl (Moses Ingram), changing the dynamic, introducing some emotional honesty, forcing the family to reconsider their lives, as she develops a relationship with Boy.
Throughout this long (148 minutes), static, stagey film, the characters repeatedly break into song (lyrics by Oppenheimer, music by Joshua Schmidt) to reassure themselves that they are living their best lives, in a mode similar to golden-age musicals. “I knew this would be a perfect morning… A good life with no end in sight, together our future is bright”, and so on.
It soon becomes clear that these songs – performed as live for verisimilitude, the imperfections being part of the point – are delusory, desperate efforts by the singers to deceive themselves. Parodic, in other words: exposing all the weaknesses and failings they seek to conceal. Yet the nightmarish effect intended by this falls flat if you find all musicals to work inadvertently in this way. You might as well watch La La Land. Or Gigi.
In his documentaries, Oppenheimer grappled with dangerous realities; here, he manipulates unresisting puppets. His intentions could not be better. He has stated that he believes the movie to be about the human family and the ecological crisis we all face, all of us in our bunkers, all of us in denial, and that he believes it might bring about change on all levels, from the political and global to the personal and private. I was longing for the end, though, as soon as it started.
“The End” is in cinemas now
[See also: Paul Brady’s songs of conflict]
Content from our partners
