Jesse Armstrong Holding Court
Jesse Armstrong, the British showrunner of Succession who also worked on The Thick of It and In the Loop, has made his directorial debut with Mountainhead. It’s a straight-to-HBO movie about a quartet of tech CEOs, holding court at a mountain retreat while the world burns below, mostly thanks to their products.
Armstrong has brought a very of-the-moment premise to the project, his keen outsider’s eye for the mores of America’s richest people, and acclaimed Succession composer Nicholas Britell. And while the specific setting is new, the action of many Succession episodes were set entirely on a luxurious estate, or occasionally on a yacht. Armstrong wrote and directed Mountainhead, an enjoyable look at a fascinating world with satirical bite. It avoids many of the mistakes that lesser filmmakers might’ve been tempted to make, starting with a lack of preachiness. The film was put together quickly, shot in March, but doesn’t feel like it was produced shabbily.
But it’s never as witty as Succession at its best. That show was full of scenes where the writing and scene construction were so strong I’d rewind and watch them again; there’s nothing close to that here.
The setup in Mountainhead—note the Ayn Randian name—is that four tech CEOs (Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith, and Ramy Youssef) have gathered for a poker weekend at a mountain estate in Utah. The idea is that they’re like the PayPal Mafia, old friends and rivals who ended up as powerful billionaires—except Schwartzman’s character, in a running joke, is notably less wealthy than the other three, despite being worth nine figures. And rather than try to take over the world like the others, he’s trying to launch a meditation app.
What’s quickly learned is that a variety of world crises are underway, which can be traced directly back to these four men’s work. Most of the tech is based on advanced versions of stuff currently in its relative infancy, including AI, realistic deepfakes, transhumanism, and social media that’s allowed to be unaccountably racist.
Old and new rivalries surface, while it’s made clear that most world leaders, including the president, answer to these guys. The film doesn’t make the characters into one-to-one analogs to Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, or anyone else. Armstrong’s Logan Roy was close to Rupert Murdoch (with a side of Sumner Redstone), but that was the right choice here.
All three performers are strong, with Carell playing a sad-sack role, while Schwartzman is about as put-upon as a guy worth $500 million can be. Youssef, of the great Hulu show Ramy, successfully stretches again, while Smith, who played Chevy Chase in the Saturday Night Live movie, found a character to play who’s an even bigger asshole.
HBO had a years-running show, around a decade ago, called Silicon Valley, that dealt with the tech world in such a way that it could plausibly be enjoyed both by people who are part of Silicon Valley and others who loathe it. It’s a very different moment, for the tech industry, the people who run it, and the way they’re viewed by popular culture, although it’s worth noting that Silicon Valley’s run ended, presciently, with a near-calamity involving A.I.
I give Mountainhead credit for meeting the moment, even if it’s not particularly transcendent.