by Thomas Willett
September 12, 2012
Branded is brilliant. This has nothing to do with the movie’s content, pacing, or acting. However, a movie that asks the audience to consider marketing as a misleading monster is just that. Every trailer that you have seen consists of footage from the third act in which flying blobs attack each other. It spoils the oddest part of a disjointed narrative and misleads many to believe that this is a hardcore sci-fi flick when it is more of a political thriller. If there is one positive thing to say about the secrecy of this film, it is the switch in title, which originated as the more spoiler-filled the Mad Cow. Is Branded able to pack a punch with all of the surprises taken out, or did it just waste the best scenes in the trailers?
Misha Galkin (Ed Stoppard) is the marketing extraordinaire whose work in Russian advertisement tends to be unmatched. He befriends a coworker named Abby Gibbons (Leelee Sobieski), who he has sex with in a car and produces a son. Seven years after a public incident that causes him to become a Buddhist, he returns to the city to see that things are worse than he imagined. Based on a marketing strategy presented by a guru (Max von Sydow) to make obesity popular, he sees people’s obsessions overpower their will through bizarre, balloon-shaped creatures. His new goal is to take down the corporations and return balance to society.
As ridiculous as the plot sounds, the movie only works on an ambitious level. Its desire to be high concept delivers promising set pieces that eventually evolve into madness. There are scenes involving slaughtering cows, atrocious CGI creatures pointlessly fighting each other, and even brand knockoffs, the least subtle of which being Ooogle. The movie has a ton of great ideas that are not exactly fleshed out or tonally consistent scene to scene. The villain (von Sydow) lacks enough inspiration for his character to be called a guru as he only appears briefly for exposition. The movie eventually collapses on itself when it decides that the only way to beat bad marketing is with good marketing, which is summed up in an anticlimactic display of indistinct CGI creatures killing each other off.
That is not to say that the movie had a good heart initially. The story of Misha had moments of promise, including a whole segment in which he teaches Abby about Russian propaganda. The characters start off in a somewhat realistic scenario that could have worked if it didn’t try to glorify the false sense of intelligence. The movie opens with a list of names of great thinkers including Alexander the Great and Sigmund Freud. By the halfway mark, the audience is supposed to accept that Misha is one of them simply because he had a dream within a dream. It is at this point where all of the wild ideas begin to fly and very few of them stick.
In a movie that is supposed to be commenting on 21st century marketing, what is learned? While it comes across eventually as an agenda, none of the points are clearly established in favor of visual flair. It is a confusing mess that is best to not dissect. There are many moments of hypocrisy in the film and the fact that the battle between good and evil doesn’t have a setup worthy of its finale creates a sense of being cheated. Branded is a brilliant film not because it creates new revelations involving marketing, but because it is just as terribly misleading as the corporations that they are commenting on.
None of the actors are really to blame for this series of unfortunate events. Ed Stoppard does a fine job playing a man who destroys his wife’s kitchen because he hates marketing. Even Leelee Sobieski is a fine performer, even if she is only asked to stare concerning into Stoppard’s eyes. Actors like Max von Sydow and Jeffrey Tambor are wasted, as they fail to be established as essential puzzle pieces and eventually disappear without really doing much of importance to the actual plot. In fact, the way that von Sydow disappears may be one of the laziest scenes written this year.
Co-directors and co-writers Jamie Bradshaw and Aleksandr Dulerayn are not idiots when it comes to marketing. There is clearly a distinct voice and knowledge to the subject that sounds intelligent. The problem is that they don’t know when to stop. What should have been a simple tale of a man who saved Russia’s marketing system ends up being a big, bloated action movie that serves no purpose to the story. If they had understood that they could approach their themes in a quiet, simpler tone like the conversational style of Cosmopolis, then this could have been intriguing. Instead, it feels like a desire to make a subject sound more powerful than it is.
Branded, like its marketing, is so obsessed with the end game that it doesn’t really establish a reasonable way to get there. It just expects the audience to find the bizarre imagery cool and forget that there is an actual plot going on. For those expecting something as informational or entertaining as The Greatest Movie Ever Sold or even an understanding of Russian culture like Exporting Raymond, look elsewhere. This is a complete mess of a film that talks down to its audience by never showing why the protagonist is a genius. Based on a list of names presented as the great thinkers during the opening credits, it is almost like they are telling you to find something else to entertain you for two hours.
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