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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