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MOLLI AND MAX IN THE FUTURE

2024

Written and directed by Michael Lukk Litwak

Spoilers: moderate

Molli and Max In the Future is just about the cutest thing, almost certainly the cutest movie to get a release in 2024.  That's an achievement considering that it's competing more-or-less directly with the other cutest movie, Hundreds of Beavers, another manifestation of the same genre, or ethos, or film movement to which Molli and Max belongs; whatever it is, I do not believe it has a name, and we probably do need a description shorter than, "intentionally fake movies, that, good or bad, still tend to feel like a sketch comedy routine that's unaccountably failed to end after seven minutes have passed."  (I am nervous that there may be hundreds of these things now, accidentally unleashed by a certain Canadian influence, though you can distinguish these because Maddin and Rankin are more interested in film history, real history, and surrealism, and in actually making you feel woozy.)  Well, it might lose the competition on quality, simply because Hundreds of Beavers comes reasonably close to actually turning itself into a "real movie" after all, thanks to a rather deceptively disciplined construction; but whatever else, Molli and Max is still the champion for cuteness, almost as an objective evaluation.  So while it's going to be one of those movies where I don't think I'll ever figure out any way for this review to do anything but skate mildly negative most of the time, I should state immediately that I have a huge fondness for it.  I don't know if I'd recommend it to anybody, certainly not without all the caveats I'm going to be bringing up in an "if you like this sort of thing" vein, and making whomever I was recommending it to very aware of its weaknesses, which are by no means enormous, but are endemic.  Even so, "cute" can go a very long way.

What it is, anyhow, is the writer-directorial feature debut of Michael Lukk Litwak, and it turns out that, basically, this has been the artistic enterprise of his entire professional life; I haven't seen all of the short films he's made since 2014, but he at least began his career with a student film, "The Life and Death of Tommy Chaos and Stacey Danger," which is inordinately close to the exact same idea as Molli and Max even if the story is (slightly) different, and that idea is, "what happens if we approach the life cycle of an extremely quotidian relationship amidst science fiction parody?"  In that one, it's two partners who grow bored with one another against a backdrop of, according to extrinsic materials, an invasion of technologically-uplifted alien dinosaurs; in this one, it's When Harry Met Sally—I guess I have to respect that the film's own marketing owns just how incredibly much it's When Harry Met Sally—set an arbitrarily huge number of years in the future, where Earth has faded into the past as a vaguely-recalled, recently-rediscovered archaeological site, humans have colonized the galaxy and other dimensions, and the Internet is, rather remarkably, more-or-less the same as it is now.  "Tommy Chaos and Stacey Danger" is pretty terrible, let's be clear, but Molli and Max is, I guess, what happens when you apply ten years of experience to a concept you never let go of, and circling back to Litwak's beginnings meant I was surprised to have to acknowledge Molli and Max as a "mature work" after all, at least on the curve I think we have to apply to such a thing, despite that phrase feeling quite a bit like ash in my mouth in respect to a movie that, if we're very charitable—and I've decided not to look too down my nose at it—we can maybe best interpret as reflecting the substantial childishness of characters who refuse to behave like adults in a 93-minute act of sci-fi world-building that is, itself, something like an admission of being unable to focus on real things for more than a few minutes at a time without getting bored and wanting for a shiny, colorful distraction.

And so our oh-so-relatable leads are Molli (Zosia Mamet) and Max (Aristotle Athari), who run into one another, literally, when the former smacks the latter with her space car out in some other solar system's asteroid belt.  Thus obligated, Molli winds up giving Max a lift back to his destination at a nearby planet and they sort of hit it off, enough to see each other again, and then many times, as we learn of their respective personalities—Max is a would-be competitive robot fighter as well as a half-fish-person from Oceanus, a fact he would downplay thanks to the fish-people being such a disfavored race that the human polity observes "Genocide Day" as a holiday; Molli is extremely religious, in the sense that she offers worship and obedience to a pantheon of objectively-real transdimensional beings that Max still isn't sure deserve to be called "gods"—and I will state right now that by the third act the movie straight-up appears to do a real-time retcon on the question of whether they're dating and fucking in the first, because I sure don't know how you'd avoid the assumption that they are doing both.  Well, in any event, Molli abandons Max for a grand crusade led by one of her deities, and there's no reason to believe they'll ever see each other again; of course, they do, kicking the film ahead fully five space years (it's When Harry Met Sally, so this will happen at least one more time), finding them at a very different life stage, Max having succeeded in his goal to be a robot fighter alongside his sentient AI girlfriend (Erin Darke) and Molli having become a big-time space witch under the tutelage of a highly sexual space god (Okieriete Onoadowan).  They manage to offend each other, Molli storming off, and then they meet again, and find a more stable footing for a renewed long-term friendship that they are extremely reluctant to complicate with the deeper affection they obviously both have for one another.

So there is, just to start with, the matter of the movie's manufacture: it is profoundly cheap, and possibly more charming about that than otherwise, though I'm hesitant to describe a movie where almost literally every single shot is actors standing between an immobile camera and a frequently completely non-existent set to be greenscreened-in later as too charming.  There is an adorable striving quality to the prospect of watching filmmakers trying to create a giant, sprawling science fiction universe out of hopes and half-off prayers, and it does add to that general cuteness I described, when, for instance, giant robot battles are rendered as Robot Jox-style stop-motion animation such that I'm still pretty damn sure this movie couldn't afford, so it's undoubtedly cheap CGI with numerous dropped frames pretending to be stop-motion animation.  The strategies Litwak is employing to... not exactly "hide" the fakeness of his movie, but to turn that fakeness into a unified aesthetic are at least intelligent; the big one is just slathering everything with color filtering (it's maybe not quite "color coding" in any deep sense, though it manages to make distinctions so we're not, e.g., split-screening two blue scenes together), that's punched up further with a lot of noise and blaring light, so a lot of scenes are lens flare-ridden monochromes that are justified by, I guess, "it's the future," and do somewhat disguise the joins of the digital collage even when I suspect the light-based obscurity was, itself, made in a computer.  Like, for any given scene, it works, let's stipulate to that.  But it's also wearying, and if you decided the movie was too visually tedious to bear, I would have no reasonable argument against you, even if I was willing to abide it.  It can, anyway, have some variety: the sequences inside virtual reality get a sort of TRON-on-TV treatment, with CRT scanlines and, oddly, a bit more natural coloration amidst the phony blowout of the digital backlit glowy stuff; and while it's fairly rare that the camera actually crosses the proscenium established by any given corner of the world the story's occupying, it can at least take a position on it, and I realize I am describing a potentially very-stultifying movie.  Sometimes, if we are lucky, there are set elements established with practical effects—the "physical multiplane" effect of the "city planet" stuff is, without even meaning it as a backhanded compliment, genuinely neat in its old-fashioned complexion; the best expression of it involves Max's tale of how he crafted "a learning algorithm" by throwing giant 30s mad scientist switches attached to 50s science hero oscilloscopes—and, in truth, the makeup can be legitimately decent, as good as a Star Trek: TNG episode, or pretty close.

So if that's not a stumbling block for you—and, by and large, it wasn't for me, even though its attempts to obscure its cheapness arguably make it even more abundantly obvious that it's not even as expensive as the sci-fi it could be compared to, like any given Red Dwarf episode—then there is the story, and this bothers me a little more.  It's not that I'm very precious about When Harry Met Sally, as either a specific screenplay, or more generally as an iconic structural arrangement, and Molli and Max is more ripping off the latter than the former, to be fair.  Meanwhile, if I'm being dangerously frank, I probably find the particular reasons that this relationship is reluctant to become romantic less abrasive than When Harry Met Sally's; but besides that, this is still so body and soul indebted to that film, and to things that that film influenced (Seinfeld also extends its shadow), that it feels like a full-on time capsule, but not of the 2020s or even the 2010s but the 90s.  (I feel like someone has to have, at some point, made the argument that 1989's When Harry Met Sally is the first true-blue "90s movie.")  There is, anyway, a startling "1990s" consistency to its characterizations, of this specifically middle-class, specifically urban—hell, specifically New York—kind of relationship dramedy, where everyone is this specifically intense kind of neurotic about relationships, that is probably the most surreal thing about a movie where, e.g., the female lead has group sex with a tentacled cosmic god, in that its far-flung setting makes it extremely insistent on this particular expression of heterosexual anxieties being timeless, despite that expression belonging to an era that already ended, even being exceptionally generous, at least ten years ago.  And it's actively disorienting when it's not even being drumtight consistent about that, and phrases and patterns of comic patter that nobody ever would have ever deployed till the 2010s or 2020s pop up, as they not-infrequently do.  I'm not entirely sure that Litwak is even aware of how his own nostalgia is working its way into his screenplay—for example, he's obviously aware that the 30s transatlantic accent and screwball banter that Darke's robo-girlfriend's getting up to is an aberrant, weird thing to throw into his movie, because it's a heavily-showcased joke.  (It is, somehow, still a joke from the 90s: the robo-girlfriend is a sociopathic media manipulator, and it's not so different from how they had Bebe talk on Frasier.)  But if "everyone is from the 90s, but in space," is itself a film-spanning joke, and it sort of is, I don't know for sure that Litwak is in on it.

On the other hand, I've sure mentioned a lot of funny comedies that this movie's like, and, indeed, I found Molli and Max In the Future very funny, so whatever longwinded bitching I've had to get out of my system about it, that's the blunt fact of the matter; this comedy made me laugh a lot.  And I guess that is, to no small degree, the juxtaposition of goofy-ass comedic sci-fi against a small-scaled relationship dramedy.  I'm not entirely in love with the incoherence of the sci-fi legendarium—it almost feels like it's intentionally limiting its audience to specifically "people who like Adventure Time and Legion of Super-Heroes comics" in its cavalier mix of sci-fi and space fantasy that barely gussies itself up enough to be described as "space," and there's a lot of just "actual magic" here—and sometimes there's a "first idea, best idea" quality to the conceptual comedy that made me scowl.  The latter is a lot more important; there's a ever-so-slightly more-polished Molli and Max screenplay that gets rid of a smattering of really jarringly stupid lines that I like even more, because a lot of the comedy does depend on the pretense of Litwak taking the world-building semi-seriously and characters who are obliged to take it seriously* but without needing it explained to them, because, to these characters, it's simply the quotidian world in which they live; naturally, the other thing the movie's copywriting straight-up admits to being influenced by is Futurama.  (Then again, the ending is flatter that I think it intends, and it's kind of the failure mode of "doling out information sparingly" in that its whole "Quantum Zone" thing feels vaguely baffling, and no, not purposefully, even if the phrase "Quantum Zone" suggests bafflement is a goal.)

So at its best, it's a crasser kind of Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy, with no Arthur Dent and no guide, so more productively confusing, and there's some terrific comic notions, some of which I've already covered—the transdimensional sex cult is awfully funny stuff (even being let down by the incongruous "2010s patterns of comic patter" I mentioned, the monotone "cosmic entity" cadence that Onoadowan is doing makes the god's explanation of why he has to fuck all of them pretty hilarious), whereas there is, eventually, a Trump parody (Michael Chernus) that's, get this, actually good, probably because it's not attempting to do a direct impression rather than seizing on the idea of an inexplicably popular politician selected by a reality TV game show and openly campaigning on a platform of universal misery (paraphrasing, "believe me, when you elect me, I'm going to kill all of you").  There's the dud gags that sometimes puncture the lo-fi magic of vibing with such a cozily-built sci-fi world, and they're unfortunate and unignorable, but things move quickly enough that they're not too damaging—in fact, the fast-forward structure where we're constantly getting punted years or months down the line (complete with some amusing title cards) means that nothing ever has the opportunity to get stale.

And at the end of the day, it is taking its relationship drama more seriously than probably any of this description makes it seem like, with Mamet and Athari committing pretty hard to the bit that they're just two regular people, despite the swirling madness of the universe they inhabit (Athari is risking underplaying it, even, though in a way true to Max, and Mamet is just straight good at the "90s neurotic" material, even if her physical and manneristic resemblance to Sarah Silverman is, through no particular fault of her own, distracting).  At the end of all things, the big obstacle in their way is that they each just hate themselves so much, and for no special reason beyond what I suppose we must accept is the eternal neuroticism of conscious existence, that they're unwilling to inflict themselves on the person they love.  So even if the movie is fundamentally just a lot of attention-seeking gimmickry, and I would not like to imply that it isn't, damn me if it doesn't have a real human heart anyway.

Score: 8/10

*There is a moment where Max is compelled to remark on the aspect ratio changes, and I really hated it.  What the fuck are we doing?  Hell, why are there aspect ratio changes?