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Thursday, May 4, 2017
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

‘Circle’ tanks

By BECKY PORTMAN

Daily Arts Writer

Directed 
by 
James 
Ponsoldt 

(“The Spectacular Now”) and star-
ring big-time actors like Emma 
Watson (“Beauty and the Beast”), 
Tom Hanks (“Bridge of Spies”) and 
strangely Patton Oswalt (“Ratatouil-
le”) in a suit, “The Circle” is a film 
wrought with wasted potential. The 
concept is strong — it points out the 
omnipresence of social media and 
the internet within our society — but 
the execution is weak and disap-
pointing.

The film is based on Dave Egg-

ers’s (“A Hologram for the King”) 
2013 novel of the same name which 
centers on the young Mae Holland 
(Watson) who begins working at a 
giant tech company rivaling Face-
book and Google, The Circle. The 
Circle is a millennial’s paradise, filled 
with Doga (Dog Yoga), juice bars 
and Beck (yes, Beck performs in the 
film, and it might be the best part). 
The Circle is led by the charismatic, 
tea-drinking, jeans-wearing Eamon 

Bailey 
(Hanks), 

who comes across 
as more of a moti-
vational 
speaker 

than a Mussolini. 
At the film’s start, 
Mae seems hesitant 

and critical of the company’s strategy 
and philosophy, yet she decides to 
go completely “transparent” (docu-
menting every moment of her life on 
camera), giving in to their twisted 
ideas on privacy. Mae’s ambivalence 
is never addressed or even reconciled 
in the film. She flip-flops from uncer-
tainty to full on reality star in a mat-
ter of minutes, leaving her character 
development muddy and unclear.

Additionally, the relationships 

throughout the film are left unestab-
lished. Annie (“Doctor Who”’s 
Karen Gillan) gets Mae the job, yet 
the viewer knows little to nothing 
about their past and their friend-
ship. John Boyega (“Star Wars: The 
Force Awakens”) as Ty Laffite is on 

screen for about two minutes and 
somehow is defined as Mae’s love 
interest, yet he spends most of his 
limited time using his phone. Ellar 
Coltrane (“Boyhood”) plays Mercer, 
Mae’s childhood friend, who is dis-
turbed by Mae’s ever-present internet 
presence. However, yet again their 
relationship is undefined and when 
tragedy strikes, grief and responsibil-
ity are overtaken by poor decisions 
and an unresolved plot.

In 110 minutes, “The Circle” acts 

like an extended episode of “Black 
Mirror,” only that “Black Mirror” 
does technology gone awry and social 
media dominance better and quicker. 
The film spends more time on Mae’s 
social media presence, crowding the 
screen with “zings” (the equivalent of 
tweets in The Circle universe), rather 
than resolving the film’s central con-
flict. While the film tries to highlight 
our society’s dependence on the 
internet and a dwindling sense of 
privacy, it ends with the world in a 
worse place than where it started. 
Mae might be the film’s villain or a 
failure at the heroine; either way her 
motives and actions are unidentifi-
able, leaving the audience confused 
and unsatisfied.

“The Circle” is only remedied by 

the few humorous scenes that turn 
this unthrilling thriller into a creepy, 
cult-like film straight out of an epi-
sode of “Portlandia.” Every member 
of The Circle is a little too excited to 
be there, yet that groupthink, robot-
like, screen-obsessed mentality is 
too often neglected for an extrane-
ous scene of Mae kayaking.

Overall, “The Circle” is a disap-

pointing and underwhelming criti-
cism of our society’s obsession with 
constant connectivity. The film 
tries to dismantle the hierarchy of 
privacy, yet its idea of conflict reso-
lution just furthers the issues it 
brings to the surface. “The Circle” 
begins as a hopeful, pastel-colored 
infomercial for Silicon Valley’s 
millennial Disneyland but quickly 
turns into a poorly developed, shal-
low and overall transparent film.

Dan Chaon discusses 
tragedy in new novel 

By LAURA DZUBAY

Daily Arts Writer

 The book’s inherent darkness 
is obvious from its very title, 
“Ill Will,” as well as from its 
introductory passage about the 
body of a young man sinking to 
the bottom of a river. But as one 
keeps reading, more and more 
new angles crop up in the story, 
each one propelling the narra-
tive even deeper into darkness 
than the one before it.
 “Ill Will” tells the story of 
Dustin Tillman, a suburban psy-
chologist whose parents, aunt 
and uncle were all violently 
murdered 30 years ago — sup-
posedly by his adopted brother 
Rusty, against whom Dustin 
testified using accusations of 
satanic ritual abuse. Now, DNA 
evidence has proved Rusty’s 
innocence, and Dustin has to 
process the news of his release 
from prison. All the while, 
Dustin’s wife is dying of cancer, 
his son is spiraling deeper into a 
heroin addiction and one of his 
patients is convinced that the 
periodical drownings of drunk 
college boys in the area are, in 
fact, serial killings.
 “I think it has to do with 
trauma begetting other trau-
mas,” said novel’s author, Dan 
Chaon, in an interview. “With 
Dustin, you have this very trau-
matic experience as a kid that 
he hadn’t really dealt with in 
any substantive way. So he kind 
of built his life around ignor-
ing that trauma. [...] He was in 
a sort of happy suburban life, 
everything was fine, but once 
one domino fell, everything 
became much harder for him 
to deal with because he hadn’t 
dealt with the original trauma.”
In the case of “Ill Will,” the 
trauma so inherent to the story 
— the underlying sense of harm, 
of dread and indeed of ill will — 
is oriented not only around spe-
cific events, but around specific 
people as well. There is Dustin, 
the unlucky protagonist turned 
unreliable narrator; Aaron, the 
heroin-addicted teenager who 
makes out with his best friend’s 
dying mom, only to have his best 

friend go missing and turn up 
dead soon afterward; Kate and 
Wave, the twin sisters whose 
divergent beliefs during Rusty’s 
murder trial set them apart 
for the rest of their lives. With 
the exception of Dustin’s wife, 
every major character has at 
least one section in the book that 
is focused entirely on their per-
spective. According to Chaon, 
these sections were all planned 
out beforehand. The book does 
a masterful job of using them to 
fill-in a more complete picture 
of the events and the charac-
ters’ motivations, one fragment 
at a time.
 The sections fluctuate a little 
between first person and third 
person, as well as past tense and 
present, and this is only one of 
the ways in which Chaon uses 
the story to experiment. The 
visual presentation of the prose 
itself is innovative: The lines 
and paragraphs are sometimes 
broken up in terms of spacing, 
and twice in the book the pages 
are boxed in and divided into 
columns that follow multiple 
narratives at a 
time.
 “I think that 
maybe the origi-
nal 
impetus 

just came from 
being jealous of 
poetry, and lik-
ing 
the 
things 

that you can do 
with poetry on 
the page,” Chaon 
said. “With this 
particular book, it felt like it 
was really vital as a way to 
describe the level of dissocia-
tion in the characters’ lives, and 
particularly in Dustin’s life. It 
seemed like it wasn’t just a gim-
mick, but it actually sort of felt 
intrinsic to the reader being 
able to understand how Dustin 
thought.”
 Chaon does a lot of his writ-
ing longhand, which he said 
had a tremendous impact on the 
evolution of the book in terms of 
the exploratory structure, the 
inventive uses of form and the 
revisions that took each section 
through multiple drafts. His 
opinions of the characters also 

changed as he was writing the 
book, particularly in the case of 
Rusty.
 “When I started out, I thought 
of him primarily as a horrible 
bully who had been an awful 
influence on Dustin. Then as I 
went along and sort of thought 
about his own background and 
what had happened to him, I 
found myself becoming more 
— sympathetic is a weird word, 
but empathetic,” Chaon said. “I 
started to feel more compassion 
for him. And that was weird, 
because in the first half of the 
book he is kind of the bad guy.”
One of the things that “Ill Will” 
does so well is indeed chang-
ing the way it presents its char-
acters. By the end of the book, 
almost every character seemed 
significantly — at times even 
fundamentally — different from 
how they had seemed at the 
beginning. What makes this 
interesting is the fact that rarely 
are the earlier representations 
of the characters disproved or 
recanted; the change in their 
presentations comes more from 

new experiences 
of theirs being 
revealed, 
and 

new 
layers 
of 

these experienc-
es being uncov-
ered.
“Ill 
Will” 
is 

disturbing 
and 

unfriendly, 
but it is also a 
nearly 
impos-

sible book to put 

down. Against twin backdrops 
of Nebraska and the “haunting,” 
“post-industrial 
landscape” 

of Cleveland, Chaon leads the 
reader through a dark labyrinth 
of human horrors that comes 
closer to emotional truth than 
many of us may want to admit. 
The book is a long series of trau-
mas and tragically flawed rela-
tionships, and Chaon doesn’t 
grant any of his characters a 
happy ending, but through his 
detailed, sensitive and at times 
stunning prose, he treats them 
with a level of compassion that 
is the mark of truly quality writ-
ing.

EUROPACORP

Tom Hanks stars as the film’s antagonist 

FILM REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW

Circle

EuropaCorp

Goodrich 16/ 
Rave Cinemas

The book is a 
long series of 
traumas and 

tragically flawed 

relationships 

