This surprisingly cheerful COVID film stars Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor as a distant couple who plot a jewel theft during confinement.
“Locked Down,” the latest and least accentuated entry into the emerging (and, hopefully, short-lived) subgenre of films shot during COVID-19, opens with a vision that won’t make sense until a little later: As fat as possible hedgehog crawling through a London garden as if he had been drinking cheap wine all day. A few minutes later, Doug Liman’s most entertaining rallying cry for the race of living accountants that strangely begin with a vision that immediately makes perfect sense in the world: Anne Hathaway shouting her way to a film that was made in the midst of the worst pandemic in more than a century.
Some people just need Act, and Hathaway’s effective performance as an exhausted CEO who is forced to quarantine with her future ex-husband (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is so big and busy that it looks like she is trying to squeeze enough performance to support her even this whole thing explodes.
In fact, Hathaway was so eager to appear again that he agreed to return to work with Steven Knight to do so, although it has been less than two years since the big “Serenity” incident in 2019. To be fair to both of them , Knight’s The most recent script is much closer to his clever and contained work in “Locke” than to Donald Kaufman’s worthy antics in his previous film, despite the fact that it was written in a hurry and still looks like a first draft.
This disorder can occasionally consume the energy of a crazy romance about two people who rediscover their desire for life (and perhaps also for each other) while stranded together in the same apartment at the end of the world, but it also glazed the “Locked Down” lightly and well. -Humorous with a palpable sensation of the purgatory torpor that we all know so well. Most of our days are not shaped with the intent of a screenwriter and filled with exciting incidents, and even Zoom’s best calls can make us feel like we’re screaming in a vacuum. If so many COVID signifiers from this film look like hacks in the here and now – video call echo, yeast starters, a family member who is always telling you about an article they read, etc. – they help to consolidate this ultrabougie comedy as the most Hollywood take on realistic life during the blockade. At least until its stars conspire to steal a $ 3 million diamond from Harrods one night.
Yes, “Locked Down” is an assault film, although I am more concerned with “stealing back the things you feel life owes you” than with priceless jewelry. And Paxton Riggs (Ejiofor) certainly believes that life has stolen a number of very precious things from him. The main one: the right to have a name as sick as Paxton Riggs. Once upon a time, Paxton was a rebel without a cause – a kind of tough biker who used to vroom around the world, dazzle beautiful women and beat the shit out of the men who got in his way. Unfortunately, it looks like he punched one of them very hard; he won the fight, but lost hope of getting a decent job again.
Ten years later, his marriage to the powerful Linda Thurman of Hathaway collapsed and burned in large part because she is reaching the top of a soulless corporation of some kind, and he is stuck working as a freight driver for a freight service run by an ultra-devoted Ben Kingsley (imagine if your “Sexy Beast” character meets Jesus). Recently released and forced to sell his precious motorcycle just to survive after the divorce, Paxton was stripped of the last remaining symbol of his manhood. Which makes him an unbearable roommate for his ex-wife, who is so desperate to get rid of what Paxton describes as “a prison of psychological chains from hell”.
Linda may not share the erratic movements of Paxton’s head, but Hathaway finds many other ways to express his character’s slow motion collapse: drinking wine, shouting from his sheets, drinking more wine, talking about the arbitrariness of the Valkyries, dismissing all his Zoom team, talking about how the sinister forces of capitalism slid down his legs like the snake in the Garden of Eden, drinking an entire bottle of wine and dancing madly for Adam and the ants in his pajamas. There is a big, implosive anxiety of “Rachel Getting Married” at work in her performance and, although this material does not allow the same degree of reach or depth, Hathaway still knows how to shake the bars of a golden cage without completely losing its charm.
Paxton and Linda are so full of pent-up energy that it can be exasperating to see them trying to spend it on each other ad nauseum – to the point that it looks like Liman just punctured the film with so many zoom calls in order to provide air holes for he breathes (and opportunities for socially distant cameos from names like Kingsley, Ben Stiller and Mindy Kaling). It is a small mercy, then, that “Locked Up” is not restricted to video applications; As sad as it is to admit, there is a small thrill in watching genuine movie stars like Ejiofor and Hathaway playing new material in glorious high definition, even though most do it in pajamas.
There is added haste to the wandering scenes in which these characters roam outside, even if only so that Paxton can regale the entire neighborhood with a dramatic reading of DH Lawrence’s poem “Get up!” (“Getting up for a new arrangement / for a chance at life around / for freedom and the fun of living / invading and holding the floor!”). And while the film’s long transition to a low-key prank revolves around so many ridiculous coincidences that Linda can only attribute them to God, it’s strangely exciting to see Ejiofor and Hathaway – both wearing masks – leaving the house to escape the iconic food court from Harrods and the cavernous tunnels below.
Seeing famous people move around the COVID world freely without killing anyone seems like a theft in itself, and the dominated dispute between Paxton and Linda is in the background for the sheer joy of seeing them safely claim a measure of freedom over their lives for a good cause (the theft is partly intended to benefit the NHS). The same goes for the actors who play these characters and for the team that made production around them possible. The best moments of “Locked Down” capture the same shock of “I can’t believe they really did this” of excitement around the news that Liman is going to outer space to meet Tom Cruise. If you can get over the cabin fever of it all and a painful Edgar Allen Poe runner who never finds a decent joke, there is a solid reward waiting on the other side.
Most importantly, “Locked Down” does not give up entirely to its context. The film can lose a lot of its burden if and when we manage to control the virus, but Knight’s script uses the pandemic more as a scenario than as a subject. COVID-19 serves as a suitable backdrop for a friendly joke about the freedoms we take for granted and the limits that dictated our lives long before we were forced to spend them at home. “A thorough review of a person’s life seems to be a side effect of COVID,” Linda sighs at one point, but here – in the kind of film that would never be made with stars of this caliber if it weren’t for a global crisis – that deadly symptom it may look dangerously close to a silver lining.
Serie B
“Locked Down” will be available for broadcast on HBOMax from Thursday, January 14th.
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