Malcolm & Marie: The Power of Dialogue
[Image Description: black background, 2 white text bubbles stacked vertically. The text bubble on top, emerging from the left of the picture, states “Why turn it into more?” The answering text bubble below it, emerging from the right side, states “Because it is more. It’s our entire fucking relationship in a nutshell.”]
Malcolm & Marie, released this past February to much conversation among critics and the general Twitter public alike, is written and directed by Sam Levinson. It stars Zendaya and John David Washington in the titular roles of Malcolm and Marie. This movie was one of the first projects to adapt to covid conditions and shoot during the start of the pandemic, with Levinson, Washington, and Zendaya all serving as producers on the project alongside their other roles. From interviews about the project we know that Zendaya was heavily involved in the whole process of the movie coming to be, from conversations preceding the project to the collaborative process in which Zendays says it was filmed. Levinson says that “a lot of the discussions that [Zendaya] and I had about life over the past two years, about collaboration, about representation, about the film industry, found their way into this piece” (Interview Magazine, Zendaya). From issues of race, to addiction, to relationships, it is clear that this collaborative relationship contributed to the themes explored in the movie. But what statements are ultimately being made? Was the message of the monologue heavy movie to describe Levinson’s ideas about race within filmmaking, or to characterize Malcolm and Marie in relation to one another, or to make a statement about movie reviewers? Let’s take stock and explore.
The format of the movie was the most impactful aspect to my interpretation of it upon my first watch. For people like me who skip past lengthy descriptions in novels and jump straight to where the action is, the dialogue, this movie is pretty great. I love dialogue because it can be a much better vehicle for characterization than description. With the format of storytelling in this film so restricted by pandemic conditions, as well as the choices of the director, what is left is ramped up in meaning. With one setting, two characters on screen, taking place over the course of one evening, shot on “35mm [film] black-and-white” (Variety, Carlos Aguilar), the dialogue constitutes the characterisation, the plot, and the conflict. It is through this lense that I initially interpreted all of Malcolm and Marie’s monologues, conversations, exclamations, and statements. The dialogue became the vehicle for me to understand them as characters, their relationship with each other, their place in the outside world and how they relate to it.
While so much attention has been paid to Malcolm’s lengthy and spirited monologue at the start of the film about how not all of his art is about race just because he’s Black, not as much discussion has been focused on Marie’s quiet rebuttal “You’re directing the Angela Davis biopic, Malcolm,” or the playful and theatrical exploration of his future she narrates, about writing racialized Lego movies that earn a toy company billions of dollars and have woke White people up in arms at his defense. This moment challenges, in my eyes, the idea that Malcolm’s opinion is the one the narrative is positioning as the truth. But when you are not reading the dialogue of this film as both characterization and plot, you might read Marie’s more quiet or playful counter-points as being weaker positioned within the narrative. I see it as further characterizing Marie as a knowledgeable and discerning character, positioned where she can see the mechaniations of power at play in the filmmaking industry in a way Malcolm, with his loud and energetic monologues, either refuses to or cannot see. These positions are carried forward as we see conflict spark between Malcolm and Marie.
The central conflict of the film actually starts as we unpack the fact that Malcolm did not thank Marie in his speech at the premiere of his film. He tries to minimize this and trivializes Marie’s feelings, calling her psychotic for “turn[ing] it into more” (Malcolm & Marie, 15:00), to which she succinctly rebuts “It's not just about you forgetting to thank me, Malcolm. It's about how you see me, and how you view my contribution not just to this relationship, but to your work.” (Malcolm & Marie, 15:42) This jumps out at me as one of the central takeaways from the movie, how Marie’s experience with addiction, gender, race, and even age position her as a site of artistic inspiration and mining for Malcolm without acknowledgement, compensation, respect, or care. T’s review of the movie on Small, Silver, And Hardback is one of the only ones I saw calling this relationship abusive, pointing out the ways both Malcolm himself within the film and the audience “makes a point in distinguishing the abuse as being ‘verbal’” (Small, Silver, And Hardback, T), which allows for it to be dismissed. From the flare up of this central argument till the end of the 106 minute running time of the movie, Malcolm batters Marie. When Marie tells him he is “literally incapable of deescalating a situation” he proceeds to prove her right by escalating the conversation. He takes no ownership of any of the critiques she makes, disparages her, throws back in her face the very addiction that he used to inform his movie, and follows her around the house even when she retreats. In this way we can see that the politics of Marie’s identity do in fact inform this movie, because her identity is what Malcolm takes advantage of to create his own art and what he uses to simultaneously deny Marie’s importance to the project and to his life. She is easily dismissed and overpowered by Malcolm because she is a young, Black woman who struggled with addiction. It scares me that so much of the response to this movie seems to view Malcolm and Marie’s relationship as dysfunctional but passionate, instead of abusive and violent.
What did you think of the movie? How did you interpret the conversations and monologues? Please share with me if you agree or disagree with my interpretation!
