Round and round it goes
The Circle is a thriller that lacks thrills
The Circle
(out of 5) Director: James Ponsoldt Starring: Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, Karen Gillan Running time: 1 hours, 49 min.
Sometimes I like to play a game with movie names called Swap That Preposition.
The rules are simple: Take a movie and replace THE with A, or vice versa. You wind up with such mild-titled fare as A Man with One Red Shoe, A Green Mile, A Terminal and A Da Vinci Code — and that’s just starring Tom Hanks. (Technically, you also have to allow for The Hologram for A King, and The’Pollo 13.) Which brings us to A Circle. Not a very nefarious moniker and, as it turns out, not a very nefarious plot either.
Trailers suggest the high-tech giant of the title wants to control the world — turns out it’s just enamoured of the latest gimcracks and gadgetry. Just like us. And like Mae Holland (Emma Watson) who, as the film opens, merely wants a job with health and dental. She gets all that and more when her friend Annie (Karen Gillan) arranges for a job interview with The Circle, a Google-y, Facebook-ish firm whose giant California campus looks like a cross between a university and the Pentagon. Except, you know, round.
Mae is eager to fit in (i.e., keep her “customer experience” job), but you can see her brain doing cartwheels as she tries to parse her super-excited colleagues’ demands that she ramps up her social profile.
It’s like watching someone being mugged by Muppets.
The Circle is run by two titans who remain frustratingly opaque as characters. Tom Hanks is the most visible as Bailey, the bluejeans-and-scruffy-beard CEO who’s all patter and platitudes: “I am a believer in the perfectibility of human beings,” he says.
Patton Oswalt projects a more quiet menace as Stenton, the COO. I’d give my iCloud password for just one scene of them relating to one another, but it was not to be.
Instead we mostly get Mae, who decides to go — full Circle, I guess you’d call it — by wearing one of the firm’s new high-tech minicameras on her person all day, and allowing anyone in the world to follow her movements. We can tell she’s connected from the stream of comments that surrounds her on the screen — the banal, sexist and sometimes even thoughtful hail of the wild wired world.
The Circle was adapted by director James Ponsoldt (The End of the Tour) and author Dave Eggers from the 2013 Eggers novel. That’s right, the source material is from a time when Daft Punk’s Get Lucky was still considered fresh.
And the technology — drones, tiny cameras, the Internet — makes this not so much a dayafter-tomorrow tale but an alternative last Tuesday.
More problematic is that, as a thriller, The Circle lacks thrills.
Mae runs into Circle founder Ty (John Boyega of Star Wars fame), but the reclusive tech genius remains lurking on the sidelines for most of the film.
Similarly, a congresswoman announces she’s going to make all her e-mails and meetings available to the public, but there’s no followup. And there’s no real explanation for Annie’s sudden meltdown. Instead, we get Mae’s personal Truman Show, some flowery rhetoric masquerading as deep thought and a lot of arguments about transparency and democracy that wouldn’t fly in a highschool debating team match.
We also get some fine performances — even with an unfamiliar accent, “Watson is superb” (put that on your poster, movie studio!) and there’s nice work by Glenne Headly and the late Bill Paxton (his last big-screen role) as her parents, and by Ellar Coltrane (Boyhood) as a possible romantic interest. But it’s not enough to overcome the gaps in the screenplay.
Might as well try to square the circle.