Zendaya and John David Washington have been viewed as young their entire careers. Zendaya is a prisoner of her youth due to her Disney beginnings and her post-Disney roles are teens despite being 24 in real life. Washington is 36, but his filmography isn’t long. Malcolm and Marie offers the actors an opportunity to change that.
Written and directed by Euphoria creator Sam Levinson, Malcolm and Marie is about a couple (played by Washington and Zendaya) whose relationship unravels after an incident during the premiere of Malcolm’s film. The opportunity to see Zendaya and Washington mix things up is intriguing, but do they have the chops to handle heavier roles?
Zendaya and Washington have good chemistry, but their performances are mismatched. It’s like that time Big Sean had Kendrick Lamar do a guest spot on “Control” – it was a good look, but Sean couldn’t help getting washed because Kendrick was so far ahead of him.
Zendaya finally grows up as Marie. If you watched Euphoria, she hinted at the ability to play heavier roles, but she was still playing a teenager with youth's innocence to compensate for Rue’s flaws. In Marie, Zendaya has no such protections.
With a Pandora’s Box of demons at her disposal via Marie, Zendaya takes the viewer on an emotional roller coaster that shows her hitting every affecting cue possible. From laughing at her “white voice” to growing frustrated as she finds new arguments to her heartbreaking monologue about her “past,” Zendaya meticulously pulls your strings and has you at her will. That range is why she will be adding an Oscar and then some to her Emmy sooner rather than later.
Washington’s performance is good but too uneven to be in the same class as Zendaya’s. When he’s delivering soul-crushing lines in a calm but stinging tone after promising to hurt Marie “ten times worse,” it’s clear this apple didn’t fall far from his 2-time Oscar-winning tree.
On the other hand, Washington didn’t handle the monologues that required him to project his emotions well. These scenes felt robotic and coached. Whether he was celebratory or angry, Washington yelled his lines instead of expressing his feelings as naturally as possible. It doesn’t completely sink the performance, but its potential to be great was hijacked.
The inconsistency continues behind the camera. Malcolm and Marie looks nice for a film shot entirely in black and white. Cinematographer Marcell Réval adds to this by using intimate close-ups and various landscape shots to perfectly capture a scene’s mood. The music is another huge plus as singer Labrinth also excels in that aspect.
However, Levinson almost wastes Malcolm and Marie's wonderful technical attributes by being his own worst enemy. The story is a rich one and the dialogue he wrote is sharp, but there’s a lack of cohesiveness that dogs the movie.
There are moments where Malcolm and Marie finds a groove and out of nowhere will come a monologue that’s way more related to personal matters Levinson is dealing with than anything Malcolm and Marie are battling. No scene epitomizes this more than Malcolm’s rants about the “white girl who writes for the LA Times” and authenticity. Even the most abstract state of mind couldn’t connect the dots for how they related to the couple’s troubles.
Malcolm and Marie is not an easy watch. It’s a 106-minute argument with a few moments of peace that allow its participants to reenergize just enough to start arguing again. It works to an extent, but you have to watch without prejudice to enjoy the movie.
Suspending your ideals for a moment or 70 will treat you to Zendaya taking the next step in a potential EGOT winning career and Washington in a shaky but good enough performance that inches him a little further away from his father’s shadow. The film does get in its own way at times because Levinson awkwardly uses the couple as a vessel to air his grievances, but Zendaya’s evolution into a grown-up star drowns all of that out and makes Malcolm and Marie a must-see.
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