While misanthropes may not be much fun to be around with in real life, they are great to watch on screen. I was reminded of this when watching Victor Levin’s Destination Wedding (2018). Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves play Lindsay and Frank, emotionally broken strangers who are forced into each other’s company when attending the destination wedding of a couple they actively dislike at San Luis Obispo, California. Seeing them together awakened memories of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992). Ryder roared back into the public consciousness with the Netflix series Stranger Things, while Reeves continues to up the action stakes with the rambunctious John Wick franchise.
Destination Wedding plays out as a two-hander, with all other characters (except a mountain lion) relegated to the background. Levin’s script is a collection of snarky, misanthropic lines. At one point, Lindsay asks, “Don’t you believe there is someone for everyone?” And pat comes Frank’s reply: “Close. I believe that there is nobody for anyone.” One of the most memorable screen misanthropes is Jack Nicholson’s Melvin Udall in James L Brook’s As Good As It Gets (1997). Udall is a best-selling novelist, who is also clinically OCD. Nicholson chews all the available scenery while delivering lines like, “I’m drowning here, and you’re describing the water!” He duly won his third Oscar for the role.
It should come as no great surprise that Molière’s 1666 play, The Misanthrope, has been adapted numerous times for the screen, from 1923 to the present day. It has also appeared as a play within a film in Philippe Le Guay’s Bicycling With Molière (2013). Fabrice Luchini plays a renowned stage actor who has retired to the countryside at the peak of his career, unable to take the pressure any more. His splendid isolation is interrupted when Lambert Wilson, the current rage of the Paris stage, visits him with the idea of producing The Misanthrope. Trouble is, Wilson wants to play Alceste, the titular role, while offering the lesser role of Philinte to Luchini.
Luchini has played his share of grouches, most notably in Christian Vincent’s Courted (2015) where he plays a strict, fastidious judge, and in Anne Fontaine’s Gemma Bovery (2014) where he plays a Flaubert-obsessed crusty baker who is taken with a British couple that moves into his village and displays behavioural patterns akin to Madame Bovary.
There is a rich vein of misanthropy that runs through the work of Woody Allen and perhaps the most obvious example is Whatever Works (2009), where Larry David plays a people-hating NYC divorcé. In all the films mentioned here, the misanthrope is a male, miserable git, and salvation appears in the form of a woman. Nicholson ricochets off the luminous Helen Hunt, who also won an Oscar for her role; Luchini bounced off Maya Sansa in Bicycling With Moliere, Sidse Babett Knudsen in Courted and Gemma Arterton in Gemma Bovery; and Larry David plays Pygmalion to Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works.
Naman Ramachandran is a journalist and author of Rajinikanth: The Definitive Biography, and tweets @namanrs