The Ugly American – arrogant, insensitive, incurious – is an enduring figure, one easily adapted to changing mores. In Spanish-Argentine filmmaker Amalia Ulman’s absurdist comedy, the Ugly American is (ugh) a content creator. A whole team of them, in fact, working on some kind of globe-trotting, cool-hunting show that professes to explore “crazy subcultures around the world.” I’ve seen some press materials define the team as a documentary crew, but that seems over-charitable for the kind of nitwittery on display. Case in point: Looking to profile a viral musician, assistant Jeff (Wolff) mistakes one South American city for another and sends the entire production team to the wrong country altogether. Once there, they decide to make a bad situation worse by faking a different viral trend in the tiny rural community outside of Buenos Aires they erroneously landed in. Despite these Americans’ staggering neediness and self-absorption, the whole community chips in to help them fake the videos.
Casting herself (as in her first feature El Planeta), Ulman is a bright spot as the savviest member of the production team. On the sliding scale of awfulness, she and her chill-dude fellow crew member Justin (Apollonio, styled amusingly like a Welcome Back, Kotter extra) are benign enough, and Justin’s slow-building camaraderie with a local single dad (Jacubowicz) is genuinely sweet. But the rest of the team – show host Edna (Sevigny in a small role playing somebody like herself – an icon of cool – only letting us see her sweat), her producer husband (Rex, in a bit part), and Jeff, a whiny baby lech – are just the worst. And not one of them is perceptive enough to pick up on about eight different legitimate stories staring them in the face that they could report on instead of manufacturing this fake one.
Ulman’s vision of the Ugly American is ultimately more generous than ugly; she mostly just makes the case that Americans are flaming idiots. At this particular moment in American history, that’s hard to argue against. Only one wishes in making that case, the laughs hit a little harder, the story’s progression moved a little less leisurely, and the investment in the local population – who are a lot more interesting than these idiot interlopers – amounted to something a little more robust. Modest to the point of a muted impact, Magic Farm feels more like a work-in-progress than a final draft.
This article appears in May 9 • 2025.
