It’s undeniable that Joshua Oppenheimer is a director of ambition: not of anything so prosaic as career or plaudits, but of form. His 2003 documentary The Globalization Tapes tried to create a grand unification theory of international exploitation. His international breakout, 2013’s The Act of Killing, and its 2015 companion piece, The Look of Silence, exposed the failure of the international community to punish Indonesian death squads through the mechanisms of theatre and eye examinations.
So, for Oppenheimer’s latest project to be a musical about a rich family hiding in a bunker after the end of the world, well, that just seems par for the course.
The End makes direct reference to his earlier work, as the unnamed father (Shannon) made his fortune in oil in Indonesia. Now he’s quite literally holed up in a former salt mine with his wife (Swinton, sporting a very questionable wig) and a small coterie of servants. Surrounded by the great artworks of the old world, he’s working with his son (MacKay in a part that 20 years ago would have gone to Jesse Eisenberg) on his autobiography – a revisionist history of his own involvement in those same crimes, intended for an unknown audience. After all, who exists outside of their caverns? Well, there’s the Girl (Ingram, The Same Storm, Obi-Wan Kenobi) who seeks sanctuary with these oligarchs of an empty world. Her appearance turns the head of the feckless fail son as she teaches him about Love and Globalization and Class Consciousness, while the family’s cadre of courtiers (James’ doctor, Gallagher’s chef, and McInnerny’s major domo) protect their own positions in this new dynamic.
That predictable upstairs/downstairs dynamic is given little lift or texture by the mostly immemorable score. The music would have benefitted greatly from more of Joshua Schmidt’s jagged, discordant sensibilities and less of the big tune tendencies of his collaborator here, Marius de Vries (best known in cinematic circles for Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge). It’s hard not to feel that Oppenheimer should have been even more ambitious in his musical selection, gone for a full modern operatic endeavor, called John Adams or Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell, and said, “I want a Nixon in China! I want my own The Manchurian Candidate!” There are flashes of grandeur, as when MacKay indulges in a Kurt Weill-influenced pratfall song-and-dance routine to “Alone,” but they’re few and far between. That tune has Schmidt’s cunning signature all over it and is also one of the few times that cinematographer Mikhail Krichman can cut loose. Best known for his work with Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev (Loveless, Leviathan), he works miracles with a set that is mostly just endless blue walls and rippling tunnels, but there’s really not that much going on in front of them.
Maybe the real issue is that The End is ultimately not that ambitious where it really counts: politically. Oppenheimer never quite embraces the absurdity and madness of his own proposition, and instead engages in a surprisingly flat tragicomedy of manners. His version of this post-apocalyptic, post-industrial aristocracy feels so tied to the early 20th century – tap dancing in straw boaters, quibbling about where to hang the Monet, laboring under quietly maintained decorum – that Henry James would recognize them. The End adds less to any political discussion than when Coppola put the plantation scene back in Apocalypse Now. As actual modern technocrats dream of escaping environmental catastrophe by fleeing to Mars, Oppenheimer’s staid vision of the splendid isolation of the upper class is nowhere near as ambitious as it needs to be.
This article appears in December 13 • 2024.
