Last week, I Young Ones, a film that uses a near future of a massive water shortage to explore man’s pride, greed, and struggle for survival. The film is not wholly successful in its ambitions, shifting away from its themes midway through into a more traditional revenge film, but with the help of a quartet of terrific performances, the film is never something Autómata was: boring.
A rather subdued Michael Shannon plays Ernest Holm, the patriarch of a family who is clinging onto a 20-acre farm, despite a drought that has dried up his and the surrounding land. He and his son Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee) now sell rations to the other people who have decided not to leave their desert homes. He tries to be honest about his business affairs and will not give in to paying under-the-table money to the water company for them to irrigate his land. No-goodnik Flem Lever (Nicholas Hoult), however, will go that extra distance. He wants Ernest’s land and is willing to do whatever it takes to get it, starting with cozying up to his daughter Mary (Elle Fanning).
The film is divided into three chapters, each following a different character. The first, following Ernest, is where we get the most thematic exploration. He is a former alcoholic who is strong in his convictions. He genuinely wants what is best for his family, but he is unwilling to compromise the land which once provided him with sustenance. He would rather wait it out and pray for the rain, despite all signs pointing to that being a bad idea. This makes his clash with Flem very intriguing, as it becomes a battle between pride and greed. I was on edge, wondering who was going to win out in the end.
The second follows Flem. This is the segment where his greed comes back to bite him in the ass. He gets in over his head, dealing with people he thinks he can handle, thinking he is smarter than he actually is. Seeing someone achieve their goal and showing the direct repercussions of it immediately afterward is something I find very interesting. Typically if someone gets what he or she wants in a film, it is the ending, and we do not get to see where the story goes after that. The segmented nature allows for a totally different shift in story, which can be a great benefit.
It is the third chapter where the film does not fully come together. This one follows Jerome in his discovery of how Flem has betrayed his family. It is the most familiar of the three sections and throws out all the thematic stuff I found so interesting in the first two. This is also the chapter that felt the most stretched. We know where the climax is going to happen, and writer/director Jake Paltrow pads out the running time a little too much before we get there. He wants to pull the tension like a rubber band until it snaps, but up until that point, the thriller aspect of the film has never been a focal point.
I do not think I can overstate just how good these four primary performers are. I like seeing Shannon in a more normal guy role. He can play crazy better than anyone, but seeing him as a real guy with real problems was very engrossing. Hoult, an actor who has never done anything for me, steps up his game to be appropriately threatening when he has all of the cards he needs and panicked when everyone else has better hands. Those two particularly play off each other well in their confrontations.
Smit-McPhee believably becomes a force when he finds out Flem’s true self, and Fanning understands young, irrational love very well. It was very odd to see her and Hoult have intimate scenes together, considering she is 16 and he is in his 20s, but thankfully, the scenes never get too graphic. It still made me feel weird knowing the age gap. I also want to give a special accommodation to Liah O’Prey, who plays a girl helping Jerome sneak into a heavily secure city. She just had a presence about her I found very interesting. She’s in the film for about five minutes but leaves a massive impression.
Paltrow uses some familiar story beats here, but he executes them so well it did not matter. I got caught up in the drama, even though I knew what was probably going to happen. He, along with director of photography Giles Nuttgens, makes their environment properly desolate and empty. It was a world I bought into almost immediately. It is not too different from our own, but with some updated technology here and an odd piece of clothing there, he makes it his own. Nathan Johnson‘s score is sweeping in a way we do not hear in movies anymore.
This is not a great piece of cinema, but it is a thoroughly entertaining one. It gave me some things to think about, which is what a movie should do. It made me think about how far I would go in my need to survive. I probably would not go as far as these people (I’m pretty weak), but seeing this character drama is still engaging nonetheless. It did lose me a little in the third act, but the film had built up enough goodwill up until then that I can forgive it. I look forward to seeing what Jake Paltrow has next. I also hope Liah O’Prey is in more movies.
