'Malcolm & Marie' review: Insufferable, self-satisfied talk-fest

Two people talking – it can be the stuff of great movies, though only in the right hands. "My Dinner with Andre," Louis Malle’s 1981 film about two men trading philosophies over shrimp appetizers, remains the gold standard of cinematic two-handers. Tom Noonan’s "What Happened Was…," a 1994 drama about a doozy of a first date, is another contender (it’s just been re-released). The two-actor concept is the ultimate writerly challenge: Can you rivet an audience’s attention with the fewest possible dramatic ingredients?

Sam Levinson’s "Malcolm & Marie" is another such entry. John David Washington ("Tenet") plays Malcolm, a brash young filmmaker, while Zendaya ("Spider-Man: Homecoming") is Marie, his girlfriend and a former actress. We first see them entering a modern-rustic cabin after attending his film premiere. He swaggers in, wearing a slim suit, feeling good that his "authentic" drama about a young junkie was a hit with the critics. She stomps in, barely covered by a lamé gown and boiling mad that Malcolm never mentioned her in his thank-you speech.

It’s a good jumping-off point for a lovers’ quarrel: A minor oversight with major implications. What might we glimpse under the veneer of these good-looking, well-dressed characters?

The answer: Not much. "Malcom & Marie" is structured as a younger, hipper version of "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" – facades peeled away over a single evening – but there’s little here to peel. Levinson (son of "Diner" filmmaker Barry Levinson and the creator of HBO’s "Euphoria," also starring Zendaya) has written two exasperatingly shallow characters. One is a portrait of the artist as a pompous young man, the other a petulant fight-picker whose only purpose is to prompt the artist’s next monologue.

And boy, can he monologue -- about race, authenticity, the great directors, the nature of love, the nature of cinema. (He uses the word "cinema" a lot.) No wonder Marie looked so miserable at the opening credits: She knew she’d be stuck in a house for two hours listening to Levinson’s – sorry, Malcom’s – grand theories about Ed Wood, Ida Lupino, Black filmmakers, the male gaze and "Karens." This movie takes Malcolm so seriously that it sometimes feels like mockery: "That’s not how you judge cinema," our hero fumes, "by the 600 trillion different choices not made due to an intangible yet purely hypothetical assessment of one’s identity!"

"Malcolm & Marie" deserves credit for shooting with a skeleton crew of 22 during the pandemic, for the handsome black-and-white cinematography (by Marcel Rév) and for the actors’ fierce determination etc etc… "Malcolm & Marie" deserves credit for the handsome black-and-white cinematography (by Marcel Rév) and the actors’ fierce determination to make Levinson’s solipsistic screenplay sound like dialogue between humans. Since Malcolm loves old directors so much, he should revisit Howard Hawks’ "Twentieth Century," a proto-screwball classic from 1934. He might recognize himself in John Barrymore’s character, a show-biz ham with an ego the size of Jupiter. But he probably wouldn’t find it funny.