It’s all Downhill for Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the broad Force Majeure remake
Last summer, a shocking viral video began pinging around Twitter. In the clip, a man at a ski resort makes a panicked dash for safety during a controlled avalanche, abandoning his wife and two children to the wall of snow rushing toward them. “Men are unbelievably useless” read one tweet from a verified user. Others chimed in to express their disbelief that someone could behave so selfishly. What many of them didn’t know, but a number of annoyed and amused cinephiles were more than eager to tell them, was that this wasn’t cellphone footage of a real incident. It was a scene from Force Majeure, a 2014 Swedish comedy about male ego in crisis. That the moment could be confused for reality… well, it was like a punchline out of the film itself. Ruben Östlund, its exacting writer-director, must have smiled when he heard.
This isn’t the only blip on the pop-culture radar Force Majeure is presently enjoying. Was its second life as an unlikely meme just sly viral marketing for its transformation into a kinder, gentler Will Ferrell comedy? Downhill, a new remake from writer-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, is very close to exactly what you might expect from an American version. While the original was a bone-dry, scathingly funny portrait of a marriage destabilized by a kneejerk act of self-preservation, the humor here is broader, with bawdy masturbation mishaps and gags about hashtags. It’s also more forgiving, softening the assault on fragile masculinity with notes of sentimentality. And gone, of course, is the precision of Östlund’s craft; dash any unrealistic hopes of seeing Ron Burgundy stumble through some carefully and unnerving composed long takes.
The premise remains intact, however. Its inciting incident is still that now internet-famous failure of nerve—the moment when a well-off businessman, here Pete (Ferrell), instinctively sprints away from the billowy cloud of snow rapidly approaching the mountainside patio where he’s having breakfast with his wife, Billie (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and their two preteen boys. The avalanche is a false alarm, an optical illusion of doom; all it really does is blow some flakes over the alarmed guests. But it certainly feels like a brush with death while it’s happening. And it casts a cloud of resentment and shame over the family’s vacation in the Alps, as Pete stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the cowardice of his actions and Billie simmers with resentment at a man with no apparent protective instincts toward his wife and children.
Sounds gut-busting, no? In Östlund’s hands, it genuinely was; Force Majeure, for all the chilly remove of its filmmaking, found constant, inspired cringe comedy in its patriarch’s crumbling self-image and pathological abnegation of responsibility. Downhill strains for laughs of a different sort, many of them pitched to the wheelhouse of its TV-trained stars. Faxon and Rash, who previously wrote and directed the throwback ’80s summer comedy The Way, Way Back, play up the discrepancy between Pete and Billie’s buttoned-up American marriage and the blasé sexual liberation of their Swiss hosts, including Miranda Otto as an over-sharing, polyamorous hotel manager. Silicon Valley’s Zach Woods is also on hand as Pete’s coworker, vacationing through Europe with his younger girlfriend (Zoe Chao), and dropping awkward asides during the scene where Billie finally addresses the elephant in the room. (Woods has been cast in the part occupied in Force Majeure by Kristofer Hivju of Game Of Thrones, who has a very funny cameo in Downhill).
If there’s a real draw to this bastardized variation, it’s Louis-Dreyfus. She really taps into Billie’s frustration and disappointment, supplying what sporadic pathos the film achieves (as during her big monologue, when she replays the terror of the avalanche) but also grounding the wackier interludes in recognizable emotion. It’s to Downhill’s credit that it does try to imagine a life for Billie outside of her domestic discord—conceiving, for example, of a flirtation with infidelity colored by her own midlife anxiety. Ferrell, on the other hand, is miscast. There’s a certain appeal to seeing this frequently over-the-top performer dial down his bellowing tendencies; he’s working in a mode here much closer to the change-of-pace melancholy of Everything Must Go than the exaggerated shtick of his star vehicles. But with the SNL alum in the role, Pete comes across like a dopey sitcom dad from the start—how far, you wonder, can he really fall in the estimations of his family? Downhill doesn’t so much unbalance the gender roles of his marriage as nudge Pete toward the realization that he needs to be a more engaged father. It’s a soupy conflict.
Maybe it’s good that Downhill doesn’t try to replicate Östlund’s more withering farce. The film could have taken the easiest route of tracing over its predecessor entirely, offering a scene-for-scene facsimile à la the pilot of the American Office. But Force Majeure exists. Should one pretend it doesn’t simply to give this less ambiguous remake, with its subtext-shattering speeches and blandly bright imagery, a fair shake? Do we really need a more reassuring version when the genuine article is readily available? There’s maybe one ideal audience for Downhill, and that’s the folks who have never seen or maybe even heard of the much better film on which it’s based. But will they be distracted at how quickly the filmmakers were able to make a movie out of that outrageous viral video of a dude totally bailing on his family?