The incoherence of “Downhill,” the remake, by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, of the Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s 2014 drama “Force Majeure,” is evident from the start. An American family, the Stantons—Billie (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Pete (Will Ferrell), and their young sons, Finn (Julian Grey) and Emerson (Ammon Jacob Ford)—arrive at an Austrian ski resort. As they disembark from their tour bus, Billie notices that there are no other children among the swarm of vacationers; moments later, they’re greeted by Charlotte (Miranda Otto), a pushily enthusiastic Austrian host who, asked about the clientele, informs the Stantons that it’s not a place for children but, rather, “the Ibiza of the Alps,” a pleasure dome for adults where she, flamboyantly libertine, intends to make sure that Billie and Pete get some of the pleasure. (She displays her intentions quickly, giving Billie a pair of hearty kisses on the cheek and, accidentally on purpose, giving Pete one on the lips.)
Who planned this trip? The movie is set in the present day, not in the pre-Internet age of word-of-mouth and published guidebooks. Pete is a real-estate executive; Billie is an attorney. It seems likely that they’d have researched their destination at least a little bit before booking it. In short, the very premise sets up such bewildering and undeveloped practicalities (Did Pete take charge and leave Billie out of the loop? Did he lie?) that the movie is nearly over by the time it’s begun.
Pete is on his cell phone when the Stantons get off the bus (and Billie is reproaching him for being on it); he’s texting his younger colleague, Zach (Zach Woods), who is also on a European vacation—a spontaneous and impulsive one—with his similarly young girlfriend, Rosie (Zoe Chao), whose free-spirited temperament is in brash evidence on their Instagram posts. Pete seemingly envies his childless colleague’s unencumbered life style and openly affectionate relationship. He also yearns for some guy-ish company and so lies to Billie that Zach is getting in touch with him when, in fact, it’s the reverse. At Pete’s prompting, Zach and Rosie eventually shift their plans to join the Stantons.
This is all to say that the marriage of Billie and Pete is in trouble from the start, in ways that are both highly stereotypical and severely ill-defined. The Stantons have no politics, no culture, no family background, no range of experience, no interests, no habits, no expressions, no style—no substance and no depth. They are generic white upper-middle-class movie creatures, and Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell are left to fill the emptiness of their roles with their own reserves of gesture and expression, empathy and curiosity.
The event that brings the couple’s relationship problems to a head is the same as in “Force Majeure”: while the family is sitting on an outdoor mountainside deck, a controlled avalanche sends snow barreling down the slope, apparently right at the deck, sparking panic among the vacationers—and, in both films, the paterfamilias grabs his phone and bolts, rather than staying at the table to try to protect his family. (In “Force Majeure,” he records the avalanche; in “Downhill,” he doesn’t.) In both movies, the man’s seemingly instinctive display of cowardice proves instantly corrosive to the marriage.
Both films are variations on a theme by Ernest Hemingway—specifically, the one in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a 1936 story (originally published in Cosmopolitan) about a couple of rich American socialites on a high-priced hunting trip in Africa, where Francis, in the presence of a charging lion, bolts, in full view of his wife, Margot; the white hunter, Robert Wilson, who’s running the hunt; and the local black men who are Wilson’s much-put-upon staff. Hemingway’s story quickly and deeply parses the couple’s intimate secrets and those of their set, the institutional organization of rich people’s safaris and the staffers who work for them, the psychology of cowardice and courage and the psychic overtones and romantic implications of both, not to mention even the inner lives of hunted and wounded animals. (For the record, a far better cinematic drama than “Force Majeure” and “Downhill,” based on the same theme of Hemingway, is Julia Loktev’s 2011 drama “The Loneliest Planet.”)
There’s a mistaken notion, popular around Twitter, that “Force Majeure” is actually a comedy. “Force Majeure” is a satire, but its element of comedy is more derisive than funny. (It shares this quality with the films of Michael Haneke, whom Östlund often seems to be knocking off.) “Force Majeure” masks its superficial and scattershot mockery of bourgeois moral conventions with a chilly style that leaves out his characters’ individual traits, interests, inclinations, and desires, just as Faxon and Rash do. In Östlund’s approach, however, that spare and rigid reserve is a meaningful mannerism—it plays the role of a faux objectivity that masks the filmmaker’s facility as clarity, masks his derision as analysis, masks his contempt as critique.
With “Downhill,” Faxon and Rash (plus their co-writer Jesse Armstrong) prismatically split “Force Majeure” into two distinct strands—the faux sociological critique becomes pure and harsh domestic melodrama, and the element of mockery becomes out-and-out antic comedy that’s applied to the story like goofy stickers. The character of Charlotte tosses off heavily accented malapropisms (informing the Stantons that they can get to the next town in “minutes of twenty”) along with stereotypical European licentiousness (describing sex as no more intimate than a handshake), and Billie’s effort at self-pleasuring in a public setting ends with pure though mild slapstick.
It’s the melodrama that’s the core of the film, however, and here Faxon and Rash lapse all the more grievously into flattening stereotypes. So little is known of what’s going on between Billie and Pete, from the start of the film, that her contempt for Pete after his cowardly showing is, rather than an element in their marriage, the entire story. When Pete returns to the table, finding Billie and the boys huddling in terror as the snow blows away, he compounds his act of cowardice with a double denial—refusing to admit that what they’d been through was anything serious or that he’d ditched the family and run. This attempted gaslighting of his family gives rise to the one notable moment in the film, one in which the melodrama veers toward comedy and then sharply back into pathos—a scene in which Billie, in the presence of friends, calls on the boys to deliver their version of what Pete did during the avalanche.
It’s a moment that could have set the movie off in new and odd directions. Instead, it stands apart and stands out as a mere plot point, one that is dropped as quickly as it’s presented. (It pops up again later, similarly conveniently, briefly, and inconsequentially.) The failure of Faxon and Rash mirrors that of Östlund in “Force Majeure”: a too-easy sense that they can recognize and define characters by their type. Just as the main dramatic moment in both films is a whiteout, with the screen’s details obliterated by a barrage of snow, the characters and the milieux that the “Downhill” filmmakers depict are similarly blanked out by a tightly controlled fabrication. They know these people so well, so they think, that their familiarity breeds something as aesthetically dreadful as Östlund’s contempt: indifference.
