NEW YORK, April 28 — From the drab 1995 cyberthriller The Net onward, mainstream US movies have been hard-pressed to pertinently weigh in on the internet and its discontents. Yes, comedies are regularly larded with “old folks can’t tweet” and “these darn kids and their ‘texting’” jokes, while espionage thrillers invariably serve up hot webcam action. But few pictures attempt to take a hard look at what it all means — perhaps because the entertainment business has some resentment about its digital usurpation.
So credit The Circle with ambition, at least. This film, directed by James Ponsoldt, is an adaptation of Dave Eggers’ 2014 novel, and the two collaborated on the screenplay. Eggers’ book is both a satire and a cautionary tale, grafting surveillance-state mechanisms to a faux-progressive vision with pronounced cult leanings — a lot of its “join us” vibe feels passed down from Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a tale set, like the one here, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Ponsoldt’s movie begins with its heroine, Mae (Emma Watson), trapped in a stale cubicle doing meaningless dunning labour for a meaningless company; in due time, she’s doing much more high-tech “customer experience” work at the Circle, an internet service that seems to meld all the most annoying features of Google, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Adding to the forced-extroversion fun is a new invention, a multipurpose webcam that’s the relative size and shape of an eyeball. “Knowing is good but knowing everything is better,” crows one of the company’s principals, a Steve Jobs-like visionary named Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks).
That maxim also appears in the novel, and it sticks in the craw, not least because any first-year graduate student in philosophy could demolish it. At what point did the Circle put a hiring freeze on anyone conversant with epistemology? Lampooning the simple-mindedness of utopian web clichés was arguably part of Eggers’ point, but much of that point is often muddled in the book. And it’s simply incoherent in the movie. The novel is at its most trenchantly funny when depicting the exhausting nature of virtual social life, and it’s in this area, too, that the movie gets its very few knowing laughs. But it’s plain, not much more than 15 minutes in, that without the story’s paranoid aspects you’re left with a conceptual framework that’s been lapped three times over by the likes of, say, the Joshua Cohen novel Book of Numbers, or the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley.
You’re also left with oodles and oodles of bad acting and bad dialogue. Watson has to spend way too much time looking concerned while staring at various screens. Ellar Coltrane, who was so unaffectedly appealing as he grew up on-screen in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, can’t find any footing in the role of Mae’s Mr Integrity ex-boyfriend. It doesn’t help that he has to mouth lines like “We used to go on adventures and have fun and see things, and you were brave and exciting.
Hanks evokes an idea of avuncular visionary charm, and doesn’t have much to do beyond that. And John Boyega — playing a character who was vital in the book but whose role has been reconfigured so that his function in the movie makes no sense — mostly stands around at the rear of auditoriums, backlit, and when called upon to speak does a very creditable Denzel Washington impersonation.
The movie is dedicated to Bill Paxton, who died in February and is quite fine in the small role of Mae’s father, who’s dealing with multiple sclerosis. The dedication is a kind and considerate touch. Still, if you’d like to enjoy a movie featuring both Paxton and Hanks, I’d recommend Apollo 13.
Additional information:
The Circle is rated PG-13 for language. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes. — The New York Times
