Film

Joining the billionaire fatigue, Hollywood is sticking it to the rich

BY SONIA RAO

The Washington Post

“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” on multiple occasions practically begs its audience to dissect the imagery in its title. Though “Glass Onion” refers literally to an enormous glass pavilion on fictional billionaire Miles Bron’s private island, it just as easily serves as a metaphor for the thin-skinned man himself, his carefully constructed persona so delicate it could shatter at any given moment.

Played by Edward Norton, Miles is perhaps the biggest target of “Glass Onion,” the second installment in a franchise launched by Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunit “Knives Out,” which follows suit with a timely critique of the upper echelon. Whereas the original film lampooned Trump-era politics, “Glass Onion,” now streaming on Netflix, arrived toward the end of a year plagued by billionaire fatigue. An aversion to the mega-rich seeped into all sorts of entertainment, even that produced by major studios.

Class satire is nothing new to Hollywood, but an urge to stick it to tech billionaires pairs nicely with the industry’s more recent storytelling obsession with scammers. Consider the specific resonance of a character such as Miles, whose famed flair for innovation is quickly revealed to be a bit of a fluke. The film draws clear lines from him to real-life figures such as Elon Musk, whose recently launched tenure as Twitter CEO has been chaotic, to say the least, or cryptocurrency guru Sam BankmanFried, who was charged with fraud after the quick demise of his company FTX.

Is something in the air? Perhaps it is the stink of the “billionaire vibe shift,” as Vox recently phrased it, co-opting a tongue-in-cheek term popularized earlier this year by New York magazine that describes a substantial change in cultural trends or attitudes. “It was the year the billionaires showed who they really are,” reads a subhead on the Vox story, which at one point links to an Atlantic article from September that plainly states: “Elon Musk’s Texts Shatter the Myth of the Tech Genius.”

And with that echo of shattering glass, we return to Miles and his fragile ego. He invites to his island an unlikely group of friends, including the governor of Connecticut (Kathryn Hahn) and a dimwitted socialite (Kate Hudson) who made big bucks selling sweatpants. The most notable attendees are Cassandra “Andi” Brand (Janelle Monáe) — Miles’s estranged business partner, the Eduardo Saverin to his Mark Zuckerberg — and detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who receives a surprise invite.

The crew assembles for a weekendlong murder mystery game in which Miles positions himself as the victim, like a version of Clue where Mr. Boddy watches all the sleuthing firsthand. His friends accept the premise but recognize things are rarely so simple with someone like Miles. His relationships are transactional; his money fuels their individual endeavors, so what does he want from them?

It’s a good question, another version of which threads through the latest season of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” which aired its finale earlier this month. Created by Mike White, the anthology series takes place at different White Lotus vacation resorts around the world. Among Season 2’s Sicilian vacationers are businessman Cameron Sullivan (Theo James), who comes from money and now works in the rapacious investment world, and his college roommate Ethan Spiller (Will Sharpe), who recently sold his company for quite a large sum.

What do the mega-rich really want? For Miles Bron, the answer is consistent for his close friends and the general public: acceptance and unwavering adoration. As the real, unplanned murder mystery of “Glass Onion” unfolds, Monáe and Craig’s characters peel back Miles’s layers as well. The biggest reveal turns out not to be the identity of the murderer, nor even the involved methodology, but rather how simple it is to shatter the illusions of personal grandeur that often accompany wealth.

John Wilson/Netflix

From left, Edward Norton, Madelyn Cline and Daniel Craig appear in “Glass Onion.”

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for example, he builds tension in his story by donning the gray frock coat and straw hat that enabled Smalls to impersonate the Confederate ship’s captain.

“Smalls had to disguise himself when he was taking the ship out of the harbor as the sun came up. When he was going past the forts, he had to impersonate the captain,” Hodges explained. “Without that straw hat and the captain’s frock, he would have been recognized as a slave, and that would have sent up alarms.”

When Smalls finishes his narrative presentation, he takes questions from the audience — without breaking character. He gets a lot of biographical questions about what happened to Smalls and his family but also questions about his mindset.

The main thing he wants people to take away from his presentation is “the courage that it took for a 19-year-old illiterate slave to take a Confederate ship and sail it out into the open sea and hand it over to Union forces,” he said.

David Price, the museum’s executive director, said the story of Robert Smalls also has a tangential,

Courtesy photo Timothy Hodges portrays Robert Smalls.

but very important, connection to the museum’s primary focus: medicine.

“We often tell the stories of the wounded and the ones who got hurt. With Smalls, he could have easily been one of those folks, but he was successful in escaping, and he saved 12 lives on that boat and then went on to advocate for African Americans to be part of that Union effort,” he said. “I think inspiration is also part of medicine. Inspiration and morale.”

Erik Anderson is a freelance writer in Frederick who cares about few things more than the history of his community. Email him at erikanderson07@gmail.com.

TRAVEL

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