Well hell.
Listen, the book wasn’t great, but at least it offered an interesting thought experiment on the nature of privacy. In fact, the gentle narrative asides on privacy as relates to healthcare, individuality, reputation and so on made for a more interesting bit of introspection than the pulpy A and B stories in the book. It wasn’t great, it was middling with a stretch toward fine.
With the film, James Ponsoldt and Dave Eggers managed to extract a random assortment of narrative beats and string them together in some of the most clumsy dialog and misguided technological wandering I’ve seen since “Blackhat.”
Tom Hanks is, as usual, able to turn his batch of nonsense into a convincing performance effortlessly. Lest we forget, he’s Tom Hanks. Watson, Boyega, Oswalt, the normally charming Karen Gillan even, all appeared to be wading through the word soup they’d been handed, clearly working harder than the material was worth. And poor Glenne Headly and Bill Paxton, stuck to the couch or kitchen table and given almost nothing, you have to wonder if they knew what movie they were in. That this was Paxton’s last credited film role is a tragedy.
The biggest problem I have with “The Circle” is not that it’s a weightless romp through a tale the actors don’t appear to understand. It’s not that the story has eviscerated any sense of foreboding at the choices these characters make as they navigate technology’s ever-increasing demands for their personal information. No, my biggest problem isn’t even that they took an A-list cast and delivered a bad B-movie.
My biggest problem is that the tale itself is an important one. This is the sort of story ripe for a thriller of our age, one that asks us to face our cultural obsession with social media fame just as “Get Out” does for our cultural discussion of race. It is a story with enormous potential that has gone wasted and as such, I fear that we’re not going to see another film that takes on these issues in a smart, bold, adult fashion any time soon. After all, if Tom Hanks can’t make this one a success, perhaps there just isn’t a market for this sort of film, so the thinking surely goes.
The end of the book is a sorrowful turn toward hopelessness. Ironically, walking out of the film, I was left with the very same feeling.