WeCrashed review: Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway sparkle in this otherwise familiar startup story 

Language: English

“We’ve seen this movie before,” says one character to another in one of the early episodes of WeCrashed. Sure enough, there is something inherently familiar about the story of Adam Neumann and his meteoric rise and fall as founder-CEO of WeWork. 

While this new series, based on a podcast of the same name, spends significant time exploring the relationship at the heart of it all — that of Adam and his wife Rebekah — the beats of this unicorn story will feel intuitively mundane. If the show manages to keep you engaged, it will be because of the fierce performances by Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway as the beleaguered lead pair. 

At its zenith, when the company was purportedly valued at around $47 billion, WeWork was burning through millions of dollars a day, spending indiscriminately on things it could not afford, hiring and firing at will. WeWork was once expanding at a scarcely believable rate by leasing office floor space in prime urban locations across the world. For a thematic essence of exactly what the show has to offer you, look no further than its title sequence — a unicorn walking around young people in vibrant office spaces, intercut with close showcase shots of its horn; until we see the horn crash to smithereens by the end of it. 

When we first see Leto’s Neumann on the show, he has just woken up for the day, which he kick-starts with a hit of a bong served to him at his bedside. It is 2019. Trouble has been brewing at WeWork for a while. And it has all come tumbling out in the open courtesy a Wall Street Journal article. The board has summoned him, and his luck is about to change. Then we travel back in time. [Even this intro-prologue-flashback format has become mildly tiresome, truth be told.]

Neumann moved to the US from Israel early this millennium, armed with more ambition and confidence than should be allowed. Entrepreneurship has always been his dream, and he does not seem like much of a Shark Tank enthusiast. No, his ambitions are outsized. There is no doubt he was an incredible salesman, convincing people they needed what he was selling them through sheer will. 

His courtship with Rebekah Paltrow — cousin of Gwyneth, yes — follows a similar pattern. He falls for her at first sight and does not stop trying to court her. After her initial reservations, she ends up believing she has ‘manifested’ him, that the struggles of her life were all so she could end up with him. Their relationship seems both toxic and endearing at the same time, primarily because of the two actors.

Leto’s shaky Israeli accent notwithstanding, the guy once again disappears into the role, yet again looking like anyone but himself. Here, he strangely looks like the answer to the question, “What if a young Jim Carrey played Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?” Funnily enough, his vibe matches that look, considering he is always up to mischief of the million-dollar kind. Hathaway’s Rebekah, on the other hand, is of the spiritual vintage. She fancies herself as a yogini, a motivational speaker, a kind of a talisman for Neumann. 

Neumann soon teams up with Miguel McKelvey [Kyle Marvin] to start a co-working space which lays the foundation for what would become WeWork.

The kind of spiel you see Neumann spout is not too different from what you will see in Super Pumped, for example. [The Showtime series looks at former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. In India, the show is streaming on Voot Select]. I have not watched The Dropout [on Disney+ Hotstar] yet, but I expect the story of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos will not deviate too much from this template either. 

What I wish WeCrashed had spent some time on is the tangible impact of Neumann’s behaviour and actions on those around him. He cut a swathe of carnage on his path towards billionaire-dom, so it would have been nice to delve into some of it. In the absence of that, Adam and Rebekah’s relationship, while inducing its fair share of cringe, is also borderline endearing. They are people after all. 

Immensely flawed, conscientious only in aspiration. Neumann’s belief in the idea of shared experiences stemmed from time in his youth spent living on a kibbutz, and he reminds people around him of it repeatedly. Yet, you do not see him wholeheartedly participating in the community aspect of WeWork’s journey. Instead, it is all about making it bigger and bigger. Rebekah, prone to bouts of loneliness and breakdowns, gives into erratic behaviour, taking decisions purely based on mood. It is all meant to make you cringe-watch as you barf at the ways of the wealthy. 

If this eight-episode miniseries was not based on real people whose actions had real consequences, this story might have been dismissed as an exaggeration. The Neumanns’ oft-repeated mission statement was to "elevate the world’s consciousness." How that worked out is no spoiler. 

The first two episodes of WeCrashed are streaming on Apple TV+. A new episode will drop every Friday.

Pradeep Menon is a Mumbai-based writer and independent filmmaker.

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