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COLOSSAL.
Directed by Nacho Vigalondo.
With Anne Hathaway, Dan Stevens and Jason Sudeikis.
REVIEW: Ann Hornaday
Hidden behind a dark curtain of hair, her raccoon-ringed eyes peering from under a thick fringe, Anne Hathaway seems to be doing penance for the shaved head and gimme-the-Oscar bombast of her award-winning turn in Les Miserables.
That movie plunged Hathaway – a gifted actress, comedian and singer – into a maelstrom of internet “hate”, which is cheery millennial-speak for irrational, misdirected (and often sexist) rage.
If Hathaway’s new movie, Colossal, doesn’t quiet the haters, nothing will. This clever mash-up of indie rom-coms and Japanese “kaiju” movies (think Godzilla and Mothra) presents an ideal showcase for the actress’s gifts – for spiky self-awareness, slapstick physical humour and subtle changes in tone and colour that sneak up on viewers throughout a movie that’s never quite as simple as it seems.
Colossal opens with a scene inspired by those Godzilla/Mothra roots, when a little girl in Seoul clutches her dolly to her chest while an enormous monster terrorises her home town. Cut to 25 years later, when Gloria (Hathaway) stumbles into her boyfriend’s apartment after a raging all-nighter. Clearly it’s happened before, and clearly Tim (Dan Stevens) has had it; he orders her to pack her things just moments before her fellow revellers traipse through the front door to keep the party going.
Homeless and virtually jobless (Gloria is a blogger, but it’s not clear how much work she gets done in between binges and hangovers), she decamps to the New Jersey town she grew up in, setting up a makeshift campsite inside her family’s old, now-deserted house.
Soon, she crosses paths with old schoolfriend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who has taken over his father’s bar and who becomes an instant soul mate. Soon, the two are tossing back beers after hours, and Oscar is taking a protective interest in Gloria’s welfare, offering her cast-off furniture and a job as a waitress.
Just how Gloria’s story intersects with the Korean preamble is a mystery best left unplumbed here, but Colossal’s writer-director, Nacho Vigalondo, does a graceful job of intertwining the two events with the perfect balance of credible realism and outright fantasy, along with nods to 9/11 and the ensuing voyeuristic age of the internet meme. Suffice it to say that the monster returns, with deep ramifications for Gloria.
As a 30-something coming-of-age story, Colossal is easy to relate to, its deadpan depiction of lost sheep recalling the Charlize Theron movie Young Adult. Vigalondo does not evince the same cynicism as that film revelled in, but he’s also not one for easy allegorical equivalencies. Just when you think you’re watching a recovery narrative, he switches the emotional polarities with unsettling results.
That pivot, as it happens, centres on Oscar, a character who dovetails so completely with Sudeikis’s natural affability that when he undergoes a change, it’s both virtually imperceptible and shocking. It’s then that Gloria comes into her own, her dance with Oscar and the rest of the world taking on higher stakes in terms of her own survival.
Colossal ends with a showdown between people and their inner demons, in a set piece that’s nothing less than the fight for each one’s soul. Or is it Seoul? In this imaginative movie, just about everything has more than one meaning.