A dystopian State of the Union movie
Obama’s imprimatur tells us how to comprehend Leave the World Behind. The movie speculates on the end of the world when white advertising executive Clay Sandford (Ethan Hawke), his wife Amanda (Julia Roberts), and their two teenage kids escape Manhattan luxury for a swanky Long Island summer retreat. There, the story develops a political consultant’s test-marketed consensus about the fears of Millennial Americans. The Sandfords react to a cyberattack, plus nature’s revolt, the way pollsters do: Everything is primarily about race.
Note how the Sandfords’ idyll is unavoidably interrupted by the home’s black owners: imposingly elegant, erudite G. H. Scott (Mahershala Ali) and his angry daughter Ruth (Myah’la). Mistrust and shy confidences are exchanged between the two families, nervously showing fright and suspicion beneath politeness. Guilt rules, as when Amanda says, “We know we’re living a lie. An agreed-upon mass delusion to help us ignore and keep ignoring how awful we really are.”
Amanda’s self-reproach expresses a depressed national mood. Roberts never flashes her Pretty Woman smile; Amanda looks strained, especially contrasted with the Scotts. This post-Covid sensitivity (although Covid is never mentioned) characterizes current conditions.
That confession is shocking for a film made by Higher Ground, the production company that Barack and Michelle Obama formed as part of the 2018 Netflix deal that gave them a bully-pulpit sinecure. Now that Obama is out of office, his behind the-scenes influence on public events is an open question. Although Leave the World Behind is based on a novel by Rumaan Alam and was directed by Sam Esmail, of TV’s Mr. Robot, Obama’s participation as executive producer combines totems from the publishing and television industries — a move toward cultural dominance. Yet Leave the World Behind is a most-curious entertainment for the masses. It says a lot when a former president of the United States imagines an apocalyptic drama as the State of the Union.
Divided into five parts (The House, The Curve, The Noise, The Flood, and The End), the Sandfords’ dilemma goes through phases like steps of Obama’s “change” campaign rhetoric: The Sandfords pay for their fathers’ sins. Ashamed of their privilege, they are culpable while enjoying the spoils of American inequality. (Even so, Mahershala Ali’s bearing inevitably evokes Biden’s description of Obama as “articulate and bright and clean.”)
The unoriginal narrative shamelessly pilfers Parasite, White Noise, Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, Us, Nope, Triangle of Sadness, and even The World, the Flesh and the Devil. Trouble starts for the Sandfords when an oil tanker is scuttled on a beach; then an airliner crashes to earth; red leaflets bearing an Arabic “Death to America” motto mysteriously drop from the sky (Clay cannot outrun the barrage); and a highway full of self-driving Teslas attack the Sandfords’ escape route.
This wholesale dystopia plays with the same panic as many of the recent addresses from the Biden White House about “extremists.” But this constant ginning-up of anxiety doesn’t display masterly suspense-movie tropes; Obama simplistically fulfills his 2008 campaign promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” That promise/threat is realized in this film’s apocalyptic scenario.
When playing the Hollywood mogul, Obama doesn’t need to hide inside his compound in D.C.’s elite Kalorama neighborhood. Scenes of Amanda and Scott nearly connecting while dancing to old records, the hostile black daughter denying forgiveness to whites, or Clay explaining how “media serves as both an escape and a reflection” create a circular logic that exactly replicates the mindset of Obama admirers. This chicanery makes Leave the World Behind the most insolent executive-office musing ever committed to film — a full-out assault on the nation’s people.
You can’t watch Leave the World Behind and escape the resonances of Obama’s impact on the culture. Who can deny that the company name Higher Ground evokes Michelle’s disingenuous quip, “When they go low, we go high.” By “high,” did she mean using the cheap theatrics of racism and global annihilation?
The obviousness of the Sandfords’ obstacle-course ordeal comes across as punishment. There’s no intimate exchange about what the characters want from life or America, just an exhibition of superficial differences — racial identity above all else, with economic class as the common denominator, the only other thing that matters.
How could the Obamas choose to produce another piece of doomsday claptrap? When the climate crisis causes a young man’s teeth to fall out, and a young girl clings to reruns of Friends as the last WALL-E–style vestige of Western civilization, Leave the World Behind proves unexceptional — and unacceptable. Obama the mogul seems indifferent to how the republic is ruined; this movie is a reminder of the pimp strut, sarcastic grin, and open-collar arrogance of his recent Radio City Music Hall DNC fundraiser. But Radu Jude said it better and more honestly when he made I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians.