Most (though not all) movies that go an agitprop direction are condescending, flat, and annoying, and make you wonder why the storytellers spent the time and money to make a drama rather than, say, renting a billboard.
In the greater scheme, it's preferable for a film to leave us unsure what to think about its message.
But the misfortune is staged in such a way that we can't be sure if it's the cosmos rearranging itself on the side of the workers and against capitalist piggishness or if the family just caught a string of bad breaks. Around that point, things take a nasty turn, with the Bennetts seemingly being punished, or maybe being subjected to karmic payback. We are belatedly informed that the siblings are fabulously wealthy, thanks to their co-ownership of pork-rending facilities (though Alice does most of the work, it seems). What's going on here? A need to blow it all up? To reject the privileges accumulated over a lifetime, as other fictional characters, including some of Michelangelo Antonioni's bored rich folks, and Don Draper on "Mad Men," sometimes did? Yes, he's lost his mother-but so has his sister, and she isn't abandoning the family in time of need. His sister wants to know where he is, and if he's OK. He hangs out in markets and meets a beautiful young woman and takes her back to his room and has sex with her. And his vacation continues, without the family.
Then Neal gets into a cab and tells the driver: hotel. Neal assures them that it's better if they go on without him and let him catch up. Distraught as the family is, they offer to stay at the airport and wait for him to fetch the passport so they can face the tragedy together, on a later flight. The cherry on top of the misery sundae: when they arrive at the airline check-in counter, Neal shamefacedly says that he's left his passport back at the hotel. The family cuts their vacation short, and on the way to the airport, Alice gets a second call telling her that their mother has died. Then Alice gets a call informing them that their mother is gravely ill. Roth's character, Neal Bennett, is on vacation in Acapulco with his sister Alice ( Charlotte Gainsbourg), niece Alexa ( Albertine Kotting McMillan) and nephew Colin ( Samuel Bottomley), in the lap of luxury, as it were.
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