Mark Reviews Movies: HUMAN CAPITAL (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 19, 2020

Human Capital begins with the death of a man. We see him at work, as a server for a high-end reception hall, where a fundraiser/award ceremony for a prestigious local high school is underway. We see him on the phone with his wife, telling her that he loves her and he'll be home soon. We see him asking a co-worker to cover a shift so he can throw a party for his wife's upcoming birthday. Then, we see him riding his bike down a dark, forest road, before a speeding SUV approaches from behind. He's hit and flips over the handlebars, striking the ground with a thud.

The man is dead. Someone is responsible. Oren Moverman's screenplay (based on both Stephen Amidon's novel and a 2014 movie adaptation of the book from Italy), then, establishes itself as a mystery. We watch as a collection of interconnected characters go through the lives in the days leading up to the accident, with each segment ending and switching to a new perspective just before this avoidable tragedy.

What we don't get from this story, though, is the actual cost of what happens—at least in regards to the person and people who are affected the most by the death. That's kind of the point of the movie, since we're watching some selfish and entitled people, who may or may not have killed this man or know who did, as they go about their lives with varying degrees of antipathy for anyone or anything outside of their immediate concerns and relationships. They don't actually care if some anonymous stranger is hurt or killed, unless it means trouble for themselves or the people they know.

We get the concept, and in theory, we can understand the logic behind it. Without an inkling of the breadth and depth of the actual tragedy at hand, Moverman and director Marc Meyers either unintentionally or purposely have made a story that elevates the worries and concerns of the entitled and selfish over an innocent victim of such thinking and behavior.

The major players in this story come from two families. The first is led by Drew (Liev Schreiber), a real estate broker who has come across hard times, and his second wife Ronnie (Betty Gabriel), who is expecting twins and is in the dark about her husband's financial problems. Meanwhile, Shannon (Maya Hawke), Drew's daughter from his first marriage, is dating Jamie (Fred Hechinger), which brings us to the second family.

The boyfriend's father is Quint (Peter Sarsgaard), an inordinately wealthy businessman. He's married to Carrie (Marisa Tomei), a former actress who silently suffers her husband's inattentiveness and occasional philandering.

The screenplay switches focus between Drew, Carrie, Quint, and Shannon in the days before that man is killed (He shows up in the background of a few shots, as the other characters don't even notice him). Drew, a gambling addict who claims he has quit (but obviously hasn't), wants to invest in Quint's exclusive hedge fund. He takes a loan out on the family house and fudges some of his numbers in order to do so.

Carrie wants a project to call her own, so she asks her husband to buy an old theater that she can run. She becomes involved with an eager board member (played by Paul Sparks) who gives her more attention than Quint is willing or able to. Quint's hedge fund takes a tumble, so he becomes angrier, while stifling his wife's dream and becoming ruthless with Drew, who begs the money he believes he is owed.

Save for establishing how desperate and callous these characters are or are becoming, all of these subplots turn out to be inconsequential—and not because someone is killed as they're unfolding. The bulk of the third act is devoted to Shannon, who gets involved with Ian (Alex Wolff), a kid with a bad reputation for dealing drugs and wholly cynical worldview. Everything else takes a backseat to that relationship, and in the end, it only matters that someone killed a non-entity of a character, that the main characters only care about what they might lose, and that the incident can be exploited by at least one of them to get what he wants.

There are some solid performances here, for sure, but despite the superficial sense that we're getting to know each of these characters, the movie's own view is quite narrow. Human Capital only shows and tells us what we need to know for the mystery to be solved and the third-act mechanics of the plot to work. On top of that, its message—that people such as these are apathetic to others—never lands, because the movie itself is apathetic to the one character who matters the most.

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