It’s the new Gilded Age. We’re living in an era when the economic gulf continues to widen between the 1% of the population that owns 40% of the globe’s assets and the rest of us.
An American life increasingly subdivided by access has trickled down into a new Class Warfare Cinema.
As a reflection of those realities, cinema (and TV, too) has increasingly been offering brutal and at times hilarious commentary on the divide between the haves and the have nots. Films from big budget features to indies have been sounding a rallying cry against the entitled rich.
Notable efforts include the blistering class takedown “The Menu,” featuring Ralph Fiennes as a renowned chef who exacts revenge on the entitled elites who dine at his exclusive restaurant, and first-time director Nikyatu Jusu’s 2022 film “The Nanny,” about a young woman who has left her own child behind in Africa to care for the child of her well-to-do Manhattan employers who use their position and power to make increasingly exploitative demands on her.
Credit: Eric Zachanowich
Credit: Eric Zachanowich
The slate of films featured at this year’s 95th Academy Awards airing March 12 on ABC-TV are no different and include an array of nominated films that make class divisions a linchpin of their storylines.
The gross extremes in global inequality are most cartoonishly conveyed in Swedish director Ruben Ostlund’s award-winning social satire “Triangle of Sadness,” a kind of “White Lotus” on the high seas. One of 10 Best Picture nominees this year, “Triangle of Sadness” focuses on the grotesque extremes in gaudy wealth and abject servitude on a luxury ocean liner where the workers cleaning and making food below deck and the wealthy influencers and Russian oligarchs above deck occupy utterly different realities.
That class divide is set in even sharper relief when the ship sinks and the social order is dramatically reshuffled. In Ostlund’s bitterly wry class comeuppance, the ship’s cleaning lady, Abigail (Dolly De Leon), becomes the autocratic ruler of a new society formed among the surviving guests and ship staff who have washed up on a desert island.
Cinema has always reflected America’s class divisions from the screwball comedies of the ‘30s and ‘40s like “Bringing Up Baby” and “The Philadelphia Story” where the upper crust has a little bit of their dignity dismantled in absurd pratfalls and wanton silliness.
More recently, international cinema has dramatized in almost sci-fi terms the extremity of a global class divide — in the 2019 South Korean Oscar juggernaut “Parasite” about Seoul’s wealthy class and those left behind, or the Mexican thriller about an actual violent class war, the dystopian “New Order” (2020).
In many ways, Latin and South America, with their history of class struggle and their economic extremes between ostentatious wealth and extreme poverty, have been a cinematic canary in the coal mine.
Brazilian director Daniel Bandeira has called Brazil “a time bomb” because of its brutal class divisions separating the favelas from the ruling elite. His survival thriller “Property,” which debuted at the Berlin Film Festival last month, centers on a wealthy woman who retreats in the midst of a farmworker revolt to her bulletproof car, which plays off the growing market in Brazil for armored luxury cars.
There’s growing evidence that the pandemic has exacerbated wealth disparity in the U.S. That factor may have contributed to making 2022 a banner year for films centered on the divide between the wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, and the realization that the service industry has suffered under a pitiless economic system and an entitled class of consumers.
The hit HBO series “The White Lotus,” about the put-upon staff and the entitled guests at posh resorts in Maui and Sicily, typifies the kind of social divide recently depicted in entertainment. While Hulu’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble” peeks at a class-within-a-class divide in Manhattan where a solidly middle-class doctor and his socially ambitious wife can’t compete with their far wealthier friends.
Toby (Jesse Eisenberg) and Rachel Fleishman (Clare Danes) find themselves insulted and pitied by the Wall Street husbands and their stay-at-home wives who will never fully accept them as equals because their bank accounts, address, kids’ summer camps and jobs keep them out of the urban upper crust.
Like the ongoing melodrama of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry chronicled in 2022′s Netflix tentpole “Harry & Meghan,” the ravages of class can batter and bruise even those inside the system, especially when they bite the hand that feeds them.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Best Picture nominee “Tar” is another drama about a privileged character experiencing a devastating, life-altering comeuppance. In an Oscar-nominated performance, Cate Blanchett plays a brilliant, aloof orchestra conductor whose social and professional standing is undone by an accusation of sexual misconduct.
How brutal is Lydia Tar’s smackdown from her upper rungs of society? As in any class fall from grace, it’s all about real estate. In an instant, she trades her Brutalist-luxe Berlin apartment with its poured concrete floors and Italian furniture to crawl back to her dark, cramped childhood bedroom in Staten Island.
Even the Best Picture and Best International Feature Film nominee, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” about the young men who are sacrificial lambs in the trench warfare of WWI, feels informed by a fresh understanding of how history has made warfare a profitable boom for the wealthy and a disaster for the boys and men who fight.
Director Edward Berger makes a symbolic contrast between the promising young men caked in mud and blood being blown to smithereens on the Western Front and the immaculately attired officers occupying plush mansions, feasting on game and fresh fruit, who after the war will return to their jobs at the helm of family fortunes or continue waging war using young men as pawns.
Though different in every way from that 1929 novel by Erich Maria Remarque, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” nominated for Best Documentary, centers on an everywoman David confronting a formidable and seemingly untouchable Goliath.
In that devastating film, heralded contemporary photographer Nan Goldin and a team of like-minded activists fight to remove the Sackler family name from wings at the Met and the Guggenheim as the art world reckons with just how its benefactors’ great fortunes have been built on often dirty business.
The Sacklers have been accused of profiting handsomely from the opioid crisis as the billionaire owners of the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma that pushed OxyContin on doctors, initiating a cycle of addiction that for a time had Goldin in its grip.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
In so many of these films, wealth is corrosive and cruel; a cudgel used to keep the rest of the world in check. But occasionally a film comes along that offers a glimpse at another perspective of the class divide.
Available to stream this May, the French film “The Worst Ones” didn’t make the Oscar cut this year, but it’s worth seeking out when it debuts. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, “The Worst Ones” is a behind-the-scenes drama about a middle-class film director who recruits a group of nonprofessional child actors from the impoverished Picasso housing project in Paris to star in his feature film, which traffics in cliches about inner-city poverty.
A distracted little boy who appears to have a learning disability, a pretty teenager who has gained a reputation for promiscuity, a gay preteen and a cocky Romeo are all recruited for a film that begins to feel, in its privileged director’s hands, decidedly exploitative. The director draws from the children’s own traumas and anxieties to coax their performances and coaches them in fights and sex scenes that feel freshly traumatizing.
But as the film unfolds we see the fragile dreams and cruelties of these children’s lives. We come to understand them more deeply, examining our own class prejudices in the process. In many ways the inverse of a film like “Triangle of Sadness” that makes easy comedy about the grotesquely wealthy, “The Worst Ones” instead focuses on the class system’s victims: the children typecast from birth and presumed to lack the ability or the ambition to move beyond their limitations.
95th Academy Awards. 8 p.m. Sunday, March 12, on ABC-TV.
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