But what can I say? I found myself fully invested in its extreme performances and absurdist tone.
Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Like most art world satires (a generally cursed subgenre), The Gallerist doesn’t ultimately have all that much to say about the art world that hasn’t been said a million times before. But it’s also a blast, thanks to its energetically mannered performances and director Cathy Yan’s snappy pacing and flair for visual humor. So long as the film remains simple and funny — which it does for most of its 88-minute running time — it works. But how you respond to the picture will probably depend on how you respond to its out-there central performance by Natalie Portman as a brittle, possibly insane Miami gallery owner whose art-world affectations can only partly hide her exposed-nerve desperation.
Portman’s Polina Polinski is the kind of person who will freak out upon discovering that her assistant Kiki (Jenna Ortega) has put some traffic cones around a small puddle of water caused by a leaky air conditioner in her gallery on the morning of their Art Basel opening. The gallery, which Polina founded on the former site of a Jiffy Lube with money she got from a divorce settlement (her husband is a canned fish mogul, played by Sterling K. Brown), is not a success, and we understand that this latest exhibition, featuring works by little-known artist Stella Burgess (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), is its last chance at survival. Polina can’t let anyone see that her business is falling apart. She got into curating because she had taste and passion for the work, but now she’s all about surfaces and survival.
So, Polina agrees to give oafish art world influencer Dalton Hardberry (Zach Galifianakis) an early, private preview of her show, and he, in the midst of a dismissive rant about Polina’s struggling gallery and how she’s “a scared little nobody grasping at relevance with her ex’s checkbook,” slips on the aforementioned puddle (no cones, see) and impales himself on one of Stella’s sculptures: a giant recreation of the absurdly sharp emasculator tool the artist’s father used to castrate livestock. Thinking fast, Polina pretends that the bloody corpse is just part of the artwork (now retitled “Emasculator”) and voila, the exhibit goes viral. She’s got about six hours before the body starts to really decay.
As more and more people stream in to see this striking new piece, Polina, Kiki, Stella, and Kiki’s powerful art curator aunt Marianne Gorman (Catherine Zeta-Jones) plot how to finagle their way out of this mess. It gets nuttier from there, with each actor seemingly trying to one-up the others with the size of their performances. The ultimate winner in that race might actually be Daniel Bruhl, as a flashy nepo baby collector whose own eagerness to appear cool and au courant is easily manipulated by art-world fast-talkers like Marianne. (As she puts it, the artwork in question “is an exciting, hyperrealist commentary on male ego and power, and I happen to know a lot of male egos who will appreciate the irony.”)
The Gallerist is not what one might call a believable story, but by pushing the performances to such extremes, the director and her cast conjure a reality in which we can suspend our disbelief. The comedy builds in both silliness and pace as the film goes on. Yan’s camera glides along with these art world poseurs — each at a different stage in her transformation from earnest appreciator to manipulative tastemaker — as they wrestle with trying to rid themselves of this rapidly decaying, tragic monstrosity, which seems to be gaining value and eyeballs by the second. These are truly physical performances: Portman moves like she’s constantly on the verge of collapse, while Ortega hops along like a cartoon character; that each is wearing huge platform heels adds to the unreal spectacle of them flitting from crisis to crisis. Zeta-Jones, for her part, glides with ethereal confidence, even when the situation seems to be at its most dire.
The Gallerist is probably not for all tastes — exiting my Sundance screening, I ran into a group of critic friends who hated it — but what can I say? I found myself charmed and fully invested in it. The film’s poppy vibrancy, its mood of absurdist anguish, its sheer velocity won me over. It’s been six years since Yan made the well-liked but financially disappointing Birds of Prey for a now-abandoned iteration of the DC cinematic universe. The Gallerist is obviously a far smaller, more independent-minded film, but watching it, we feel like we’re in expert hands.
Sign up for The Critics
A weekly dispatch on the cultural discourse, for subscribers only.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice