Toni Erdmann (2016)

It now appears that Toni Erdmann will be adapted/remade for Hollywood, in the grand tradition of Breathless, Diabolique, Dinner for Schmucks, The Ring, etc. This makes sense to me, because the nearly three-hour German comedy has a great deal of Hollywood DNA to begin with. It is part Uncle Buck, part Mrs. Doubtfire. Uncle Buck, because of the unsavory, dark aggression with which the life lessons (love life, be yourself, don't judge success by the approval of others, have fun) are doled out; Mrs. Doubtfire, because of the prankster father in disguise.

But there is another strand of Hollywood DNA, what I would call the "saving the soul of uptight executives" genre: Up in the Air (with George Clooney), Money Monster (with George Clooney), Michael Clayton (with George Clooney), The Big Short (Steve Carell's part), Margin Call, The Company Men (I don't think anyone saw this, but it has America's sweetheart Ben Affleck). The lesson here is the incompatibility of workaholic dads and faceless/greedy corporations with the all-important tenderness of white paternalism. This list of movies is of variable quality and explicitness of ideological justification: The Big Short ties itself in knots trying to make heroes of its heroes; Margin Call I've reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

The big exception to this is Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street, which portrays Leonardo diCaprio's character as fundamentally redeemable. (Also in Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, everyone is horrible and there are no families.)

In Toni Erdmann, Sandra Hüller plays Ines, a German consultant working in Romania, whose job is to recommend strategies of neo-liberal outsourcing, downsizing and other methods of efficiency/austerity. Meanwhile, the executives she is working with are untrustworthy men who can be relied upon only to marry vapid blonde Russian trophy wives. What the executives really want are the most savage cuts, but this has to be imposed from outside recommendation. Ines, in turn, is a no-fun, uptight, overcritical boss. The plot of the film is that the spontaneous, kooky father tries to teach her lessons in having fun and being authentic. (Not unlike Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.)

Of course, in those other films, the movie is trying to be as funny as possible, and so the straight man is as loathsome as possible (think Steve Martin in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) and the non-conformist is as loud and outlandish as can be. The disturbances in Toni Erdmann, however, are more askew and awkward (inducing low-level anxiety attacks) than uproarious. It is more like we are watching a drama *about* this "funny" person; as film scholar Genevieve Yue remarks, it is a "sad clown" story, like Pagliacci or Rigoletto, not a comedy.

What I admire about this film is that, having set itself up between these two very predictable formulas (1) Uncle Buck and 2) the movies where we care about George Clooney), director/writer Maren Ade declines the resolutions they imply. In movies of type 1, the life lessons are learned and the "bad" new/alternative family (in Mrs Doubtfire, for instance, Pierce Brosnan) is rejected in favor of some synthesis of establishment values and the capacious humanity of the avuncular non-conformist. (Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning is another, earlier movie of this sort, although I forget how it ends.) In movies of type 2, there are two options: the dad can QUIT the firm/brokerage, choosing to take up some more acceptable and humanizing vocation to spend more time with his family. We should believe this, however, as much as we believe in the disgraced congressman who, having been caught absconding with funds, leaves "to spend more time with his family." The other option is to somehow reconcile the good objective of the corporation with a renewed commitment to honesty, from which we had regrettably departed. This may be combined with a "few bad apples" defense of capitalism, in which the bad boss is at fault for essentially criminal misdeeds (see my forthcoming book's chapter on Dickens's Little Dorrit).

Toni Erdmann studiously rejects all these options. Ines leaves her company (a cesspool of toxic masculinity), but for what we can only assume is an identical job elsewhere. There is zero implication that she will bring some new ethos with her; if anything, her father's reign of misrule has rather ALLOWED her to make a clean break with her current job and advance her career. Certainly she does not take up baking or parenting or any project that would clear her conscience. And then it is totally unclear what "life lessons" she has taken from her father, what effect this whole business is to have had on her. In the NY Times review, A.O. Scott writes that "Erdmann may be able to save Ines", but if this is so, it is nothing like the Uncle Buck formula. One feels, rather, that the comfort offered is cheap, her problems insoluble with the "lessons" on offer, and that it is perhaps too late, or that her resistance to her father AND her acceptance of him have not been cleanly untangled. "Erdmann" himself would appear to need some saving; if the film is about Ines's moral fate, we can only feel that she is WORTH saving but that no ideological prestidigitation can effect that redemption.