Netflix’s Leave the World Behind has a white people problem. The Wi-fi is out but that’s not it. The Tesla is acting funny, but also nope. The movie can’t decide how much it hates white people.
Sometimes, it’s a little, and sometimes, it’s a whole lot, like when Julia Roberts goes full Karen on the black family that shows up unannounced at the doorstep. Or when husband Ethan Hawke abandons a distraught Latina housekeeper on the roadside. Mostly, this apocalyptic thriller spends more than two hours trying to be artfully “ambiguous” about its Whiteness Studies specimens as the world comes crashing down around them.
The plot can be summarized as: White people problems become the problem with white people. Profound stuff. This is the kind of movie that lefty white Brooklyn-ites think they deserve and feel obligated to love — the former because they are self-loathing and the latter because the movie was produced by Barack and Michelle Obama.
In searching for material to turn into their first fiction feature for Netflix, the former first couple landed on a novel that ticks all the boxes of brand 44. Gay Bangladeshi-American author Rumaan Alam’s book is a thinly veiled Trump-era allegory that is set in 2019 and imagines an unspecified apocalyptic event that threatens humanity and sends an unnamed president scurrying into a bunker for safety.
But the end of the world is a giant red herring for the movie’s (and the Obamas’) central preoccupation — race.
The central family (Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke, plus two kids) is hunkered down in a palatial Hamptons rental when the internet goes out and an oil tanker mysteriously beaches itself. Soon, planes are falling from the sky. Enter the black family (father Mahershala Ali and daughter, played by actress Myha’la), who are seeking refuge from the unfolding calamity.
It turns out the Mahershala Ali character is the owner of the property — a fact that Julia Robert’s cynical ad executive has a lot of trouble believing. She even asks him to show ID. How dare she! Later, she makes them sleep in the basement, though it’s a very nice basement. Casting the uber-likeable Julia Roberts in an unlikeable role is a hoot. The 56-year-old actress magnificently looks her age and admirably does little to temper her character’s harshness. But Robert’s still-formidable star power makes her character more relatable than she should be and ends up taking some of the edge off of what the movie really wants to say.
Which is what exactly? Hard to tell given the movie’s deliberately mishmash tone and numerous forest paths that lead nowhere. A clip that has gone viral showing Myha’la’s character talking trash about “white people” has led numerous people on the right to conclude that the movie is woke. But this bratty Zoomer is perhaps the least sympathetic character in the whole movie, and her knee-jerk race baiting is something her father knows best to ignore or brush aside.
The Obamas are two of the most influential people on the planet. Politics aside, you have to agree that their potential power to create good in the world is monumental.
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) December 11, 2023
That's why seeing that power used to promote racial hatred is deeply disappointing. pic.twitter.com/HpCuyVlgbI
What is Obama trying to tell us? It’s a muddled message at best. The movie’s vision of Armageddon is generalized to the point of generic — it could be cyberattack, an environmental disaster, or the North Koreans. Most likely, it’s just a heavy-handed metaphoric manifestation of our racial divisions — the end of the world is our ultimate punishment for white privilege.
Race is the organizing principle in Obama’s worldview, and so it is the case with Leave the World Behind. White people problems become everybody’s problems. There goes the neighborhood becomes there goes the world.
The Obamas know better than anyone how to package such a patently ridiculous and repulsive ideology as race essentialism into a slick piece of fun. Leave the World Behind is never less than entertaining. The early scene with the oil tanker is thrilling to behold and a sequence involving out-of-control self-driving Teslas will be remembered for a long time. Writer-director Sam Esmail can’t shake his TV background but he is in control of his visual style, no more so than when he uses cross-cutting between various permutations of characters to build suspense.
The actors are all top-notch, fully embodying their characters while acknowledging the quotation marks they come with. Ethan Hawke’s CUNY professor listens to NPR and reads The Atlantic. His left-wing compassion goes only so far when he encounters the Latina housekeeper — a bizarre throwaway scene that is elevated by Hawke, who gives one of his best performances as a man who turns out to be more resourceful than he thinks he is.
Late in the story, Kevin Bacon has a big scene as the local conspiracy theorist and doomsday prepper who price gouges Hawke’s character in a moment of crisis. The giant American flag on his porch and trucker hat are extremely subtle indications that he is conservative.
The movie’s youngest character (Farrah Mackenzie) is the daughter of Roberts and Hawke — a pre-teen glued to her devices who is addicted to Friends, the whitest sitcom ever made. She is “binge culture” personified and delivers the movie’s final, visual punchline.
A final note about the original novel… Rumaan Alam’s book was published during the Trump presidency and reflected the writer’s publicly stated anti-Trump sentiments.
“I didn’t want this to be a book about Trump,” he said in an interview. “One of the frustrations of sharing the planet with him is the way he’s forced us to see everything as somehow related to him. So I avoid saying his name, but he’s there, because I wanted this to be a book about this moment. Not to talk about that guy, but to talk about what’s most urgent right now.”
But the Netflix movie is a product of the Biden era — and it resonates more powerfully because of it. An inept president does nothing as the world devolves into chaos around him: war and conflict breaking out across the globs, his own citizens forced to endure one economic indignity after another as race relations fray to the point of catastrophe. There is no hope that things will get better.
The Obamas produced an end of the world allegory but maybe not be the one they thought they were making.
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