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Cathy Yan’s latest opens with a quote from the late Andy Warhol: “Art is what you can get away with.” The director goes on to prove this point with a slight but intelligent black comedy that the late pop-art guru might have thought was a documentary, a pointed — and quite perfectly plausible — satire on the business metrics of the contemporary art world. At its core is a whirlwind performance by Natalie Portman as ambitious gallery owner Polina Polinski, herself a Warholian, white-haired vision of a ’60s supermodel, but The Gallerist is actually an ensemble piece, with great support from a largely all-female cast (notably Jenna Ortega as Polina’s dorky and heavily put-upon Girl Friday Kiki).
The premise leans heavily into Roger Corman’s 1959 comedy A Bucket of Blood, in which an aspiring artist turns to murder after using a dead cat as the basis for an acclaimed piece of sculpture. The Gallerist doesn’t quite so far as that, but it does share Corman’s cynicism for the lofty opinion that the art world has of itself. That said, however, the full force of the film’s comic opprobrium identifies something worse than pretension; the villain of the piece is the smarmy, parasitical art influencer Dalton Hardberry (Zach Galifianakis), whose 2m followers on social media give him leverage over Polina.
Dalton demands a “VVVIP” tour of a de/construction, a new show by up-an-coming new artist Stella Burgess (DaVine Joy Randolph), but his eye is on the building, not the work. Getting Polina alone, Dalton reveals that, to him, Burgess is “practically a cave painter”, calling Polina a dilettante whose entire career has been funded by her former partner Tom (Sterling K. Brown), a wealthy tuna magnate. “You’re grasping at relevance with your ex-husband’s cheque book,” Dalton snarls, in a particularly unpleasant exchange. Rather than wanting to promote her show, Dalton reveals that he is there on behalf of a property developer with an eye on her prime spot in Miami’s hip Little Haiti district.
Within ten minutes or so, after a very deftly choreographed feat of slapstick, Denton is dead, impaled on Burgess’s work The Emasculator, a giant replica of a tool used to castrate cattle. The show is just about to open its doors to the public, so Polina, thinking on her feet and recalling such macabre artworks as The Death of Marat, a 1793 painting by Jacques-Louis David, rearranges Denton’s posture and redrafts the artwork’s description. It’s a testament to the director’s dry humor that the first visitors walk past without really looking at it, oblivious to the enormous pool of fresh blood on the floor.
Against the odd, and much against the wishes of the artist, The Emasculator becomes a hit, catching the eye of influential art dealer Marianne Gorman (Catherine Zeta-Jones), an imperious figure whose initial reaction is to scoff. “I thought hyperrealism was dead, she snorts. “Yet here we are.” Nevertheless, she sees a place for it in a marketplace where a banana and some gaffer tape can fetch $6.2m. “That body meets the moment,” she decides, offering $600,000 on the spot. Significantly, Marianne isn’t at all fazed to discover that the body is real, nor when she discovers the dead man’s identity. “That’s too bad,” she drawls. And, yes, the offer still stands.
Though the set-up sounds preposterous, Yan’s film takes the scenario quite seriously, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek. Marianne, still reeling from a Martha Stewart-style fracas with the IRS, is in dire need of cash, and proposes selling it to a private collector, who will lock it away in a Freeport, presumably as some kind of high-end tax write-off. The only complication is that The Emasculator is getting great word of mouth, and a rival collector is preparing to make a counteroffer. In a matter of hours, the body will start to decompose, a major drawback that makes a quick deal imperative.
The art world is easy to mock, and The Gallerist doesn’t really say very much that’s new, and it didn’t help its case that the Sundance Film Festival programmed it so soon after Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex, set in the exact same milieu and featuring the exact same setting of a cash-strapped avant-garde gallery. Portman, however, keeps our focus on the task in hand — can she sell it in time? — until it becomes clear that there isn’t really much of story beyond that, and the film struggles to fill less than 90 minutes. It is, however, fun while it lasts, and the female-skewed script gives food for thought about the male dominance of the art space while making serious points about value and self-worth.
Title: The Gallerist
Festival: Sundance (Premieres)
Sales: Topic Studios
Director: Cathy Yan
Screenwriters: James Pedersen, Cathy Yan
Cast: Natalie Portman, Jenna Ortega, Sterling K. Brown, Zach Galifianakis, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Catherine Zeta-Jones
Running time: 1 hr 28 mins
English (US) ·