Will Ferrell's 'Downhill' is like a feature-length AITA post
Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Downhill isn't based on a true story — it's an English-language remake of the 2014 Swedish dramedy Force Majeure.
If you've spent any time at all browsing subreddits like r/relationships and Am I the Asshole?, though, you may feel like it might as well be. The film plays out like a cinematic adaptation of one of those posts, bringing a marital conflict under the microscope and inviting everyone around them, us included, to cast judgment on who went wrong where.
In a final, meta joke, cooked up by its marketing team, Downhill hits theaters this Valentine's Day.
Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus play Pete and Billie, an American couple on an Austrian ski vacation with their two adolescent sons. From the opening moments, it's possible to see the hairline cracks in this picture-perfect family portrait. Irritations flare up around the language barrier, a hectic hotel welcome, or Pete's iPhone addiction.
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But then disaster strikes, and those fissures become gaps, and then chasms as one half of the couple digs deeper and deeper into denial. The family is spared serious tragedy, but Mom and Dad are left with a more nebulous uneasiness that threatens every assumption they'd had about themselves, each other, and the relationship they've built together over many years.
Downhill is faithful enough to its source material that fans of the original may find it somewhat superfluous. It comes across as a lesser version of Force Majeure for American audiences who simply cannot get over that one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles — down to a very entertaining turn by Kristofer Hivju, this time as an indifferent resort manager.
Ferrell, though the movie's biggest commercial draw, turns out to be one of its weaker elements. He's either miscast or misdirected in a role that requires more emotional complexity than he delivers here. He's part and parcel with the film's tonal inconsistency, which veers from broad comedy (Miranda Otto as an overbearing hostess is very funny, but seems like she belongs in a different movie) to bittersweet catharsis.
On the whole, though, "not quite as good as Force Majeure" turns out to still be pretty good. Louis-Dreyfus is unsurprisingly tremendous, navigating the film's ups and downs more adeptly than her co-star does, and directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (who also wrote the screenplay with Jesse Armstrong) treat both Billie and Pete with clear-eyed empathy.
Then, just as the premise threatens to go stale, a younger couple, played by Zach Woods and Zoë Chao, enters the picture to play audience surrogates. If Downhill is a feature-length AITA post, Zach and Rosie are the commenters, arguing over who's in the right and who's in the wrong and revealing as much about themselves in the process. Like in the best AITA posts, there's the verdict that looks right at a first glance, and the one that emerges once a clearer picture emerges.
Marriage Story this isn't; Downhill has a pretty clear stance on who screwed up in this situation. But the fun — if you can call squirming with discomfort fun — lies in seeing how far this domestic dispute can deteriorate, and the satisfaction — if you can call tearing up with vicarious frustration satisfying — in seeing the wronged party get validation and maybe a tiny bit of revenge.
The cleverness of Downhill's conceit is how very ordinary the catastrophe is that shakes this couple to the core. It's an examination of heterosexual marriage that finds nothing very positive about it, and warns even those in seemingly happy couplings that a moment of weakness could destroy all that. In a final, meta joke, cooked up by its marketing team, Downhill hits theaters this Valentine's Day.
