“THE GALLERIST”

It’s easy to imagine that Cathy Yan would have strong feelings about critics, corporate art, and pretentiousness after a tough time with her last film. Her debut, “Dead Pigs,” received critical acclaim and lauded Yan’s fresh new voice in cinema. Then, she landed “Birds of Prey,” the big-budget Harley Quinn girl gang flick. Despite decent reviews, “Birds of Prey” became a bit of a lightning rod for sexist comic book fans who relished any opportunity to bash a female-driven film, especially after it bombed hard at the box office (never mind that it released weeks before the world shut down due to the pandemic). All that to say: setting her latest film in the cutthroat world of modern art certainly seemed poised to offer heavy commentary on her first experience in the studio system. Unfortunately, “The Gallerist” never gets there. It’s painfully unfunny, wasting a talented cast on a zany story without ever communicating a clear vision.

Polina Polinski (Natalie Portman) has a lot to prove with her gallery opening. Fresh off a divorce from her rich husband (Sterling K. Brown), Polina is desperate to show the world she wasn’t just arm candy, and that she’s the one with all the taste. However, it doesn’t necessarily help that her Miami art gallery is in an old Jiffy Lube. Nevertheless, Polina has curated an exhibition of a fresh artist, Stella Burgess (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and has been working tirelessly with her assistant Kiki (Jenna Ortega) to pull it all together, including trying to clean up a leaking A/C unit. When “art influencer” Dalton Hardberry (Zach Galifinakis) comes to get an early look at the exhibit and butt heads with Polina, he takes an unfortunate spill from the leaking A/C unit, impaling himself on Burgess’s sharp sculpture, “The Emasculator.” With visitors coming in right at that moment, Polina has no choice but to try to pass Dalton off as a part of the sculpture, embarking on a madcap afternoon racing to clean up the mess, save her gallery, and not go to prison. That’s not to mention Catherine Zeta Jones, Daniel Brühl, and Charlie xcx all joining the fray as well.

It’s an absurd plot, but the huge cast throws themselves into it, though, despite the immense talent on screen, the cast seemed to have different understandings of the piece’s tone. Portman is broad, silly, and tightly coiled, as is Ortega. Randolph plays her character with much more depth and authenticity, not quite playing in the same goofy sandbox. One of the inherent problems with “The Gallerist” is the tonal tight-rope act that wants us to laugh at the self-absorption of Polina and her antics, but the material simply isn’t funny. So much of the humor here is incredibly obvious at best, or woefully outdated at worst. Galifinakis may be perfectly cast as a snob here, but this portrayal of influencers is ten years out of date.

The only laughs the film generates are surface-level ones, like the shock of Hardberry’s demise. When “The Gallerist” goes for bigger swings, like a bidding war that goes off the rails, it simply falls flat. Yan attempts to liven the comedy with stylized camera movements to accentuate this heightened reality. The camera weaves through the gallery, flying through walls and turning on Dutch angles, but the camerawork is often distracting. Any sense of intentional campiness instead just reads as emptiness.

Satires can find sharp observations by centering despicable characters, as Yan attempts here, but the plot is so absurd that when we’re supposed to sympathize with Polina, or the film tries to get us to root for her, there’s just no going back. Any sentimentality Yan tries to mix in flies in the face of the Looney Tunes plot happening around the gallery. The observations about the art world and critics are shallow and obvious, never deepening to anything richer. Even as a surface-level, zany ride, it’s not very fun either, leaving us without much of anything to hold onto. “The Gallerist” is a disappointing misfire.