OVP: Toni Erdmann (2016)

Film: Toni Erdmann (2016)
Stars: Peter Simonischek, Sandra Huller, Ingrid Bisu, Trystan Putter
Director: Maren Ade
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Germany)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Critical consensus is a weird thing sometimes, and it happens every year, like clockwork, when it comes to select Oscar contenders.  Right now, I'm seeing a shocking amount of critics start to over-praise any film that remotely has a shot at an awards run in hopes of getting featured on posters or being the pundit who "called" the race for a specific actor the earliest.  Bragging rights occasionally make awards season perplexing in that regard, and it's why I only trust certain critics' when it comes to their true opinions, the rare reviewers who seem to think outside-the-box and genuinely give their thoughts, backlash be damned.  That this was the first thing I thought after I saw Toni Erdmann, a wildly-praised film that nearly won Best Foreign Language Film a couple of years ago, is probably a telling sign of my feelings for this picture.  Overly long (nearly three hours in length, a gargantuan size for a film that frequently is supposed to be a comedy), it's boring, meandering, and if there was something interesting that was supposed to be happening in this film, it completely eluded me.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers on the complicated relationship between Winfried (Simonischek), a music teacher prone to pranks and random disguises, and his daughter Ines (Huller), a woman who, to quote John Mulaney, is a "busy business woman who only likes business," and to underline this point, she spends most of her first two scenes on film talking on a cell phone, though it's not entirely clear how often she's talking to no one, as like her father she's a bit neurotic, though in a way most people would find socially acceptable.  The film progresses with Winfried donning a specific character (with bad teeth and a toupee) named Toni Erdmann, and tries in the process to teach his daughter to lighten up, in the process torpedoing her career and demonizing everything she does.

That's really the goal of this film, and I was shocked at its politics that so many people were willing to embrace such a picture.  It's admittedly hard to sympathize with Ines, whose job is literally as a business consultant, someone who comes in and tells a company they need to downsize & outsource to increase their profit margins.  But that feels like a cheap out since we don't realize that's what she does until later in the picture.  Her father thinks that she isn't silly enough, and as a result frequently tries to ruin her career and livelihood with absolutely no respect for her as a person or for the pain he's causing her.  She clearly loves him, and has tolerated this level of buffoonery in the way a child-who-has-to-be-the-parent does in such a situation, but I left with only sympathy for Ines for putting up with such a man crushing all of her dreams because they didn't mirror his own.  There's no sense that he's mentally-ill or that he can't tell reality apart from his made-up world, he's just a narcissistic jackass who only has time for himself.  That the screenwriters don't get the horrible, nasty sexism of this dynamic, where they only see Winfried as the one we should be celebrating, is absurd and gross.  It's also strange, because there's a lot of very interesting looks at sexism in scenes without Winfried, where we see the sorts of double standards that Ines receives as a woman who enjoys power, sex, and her job more than more maternal cares that we try to attribute to women.

This wouldn't be as big of a problem if the film wasn't so damn long.  There's virtually no reason that this movie needs to be 162 minutes.  The same points keep repeating and repeating (oh look, here's Toni Erdmann back to destroy another aspect of Ines's hard-fought career because she's not "silly" enough), and it's rarely funny.  The penultimate sequence where she finally gives in to her dad's absurd beliefs and has a nudist birthday party, likely destroying her life for herself because it's already off-the-rails, reads as depressing to me more than it does cathartic.  Ines realizes that she can't escape her father, so why not just give into him?  This is dour, and a far-off gaze at the end doesn't do enough to explain whether the filmmakers think this is wrong or not, but considering that we had to sit through a tedious 162 minutes of torturing this poor woman through pranks and "a bit of fun" style old-school sexism, you'd think the filmmakers would have found time to give us some sort of answer as to whether Ines even likes that she gave in to her father's bullying, or whether he pushed her into unhappiness because she was satisfied with a socially-unacceptable love of career.