Susan Granger’s review of “The Circle” (STX Entertainment)
Tackling the “Me-centric” revelatory culture of Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc., James Ponsoldt’s timely thriller delves into the ubiquitous perils of contemporary technology.
When Mae Holland (Emily Watson) goes to work for The Circle, a massively powerful social media company in the San Francisco Bay Area, she’s thrilled. Beginning as a ‘guppy,’ she’s assigned to a Customer Service desk, where she’s expected not only to excel but also to participate in off-hour and weekend events with her co-workers.
Run by a management team consisting of charismatic visionary Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks) and businessman Tom Stenton (Patton Oswalt), The Circle is touting a new social interface app, TruYou, a single-identity password solution which eliminates anonymity, along with SeeChange, a tiny, inconspicuous webcam that can be attached to any surface to emit constant surveillance.
“Knowing is good, but knowing everything is better,” claims evangelistic Eamon Bailey at one of his “Dream Friday” pep talks.
Grateful that she can extend her insurance coverage to include her frail, multiple sclerosis-afflicted father (the late Bill Paxton, in his last screen role) and that the company’s omnipresent monitors saved her from drowning when she foolishly went kayaking alone at night, guileless Mae offers to relinquish all personal privacy and go “fully transparent,” so that everything she does can be seen by Circle members.
Obviously, this leads to more than one embarrassing incident, the most tragic involving Mae’s off-the-grid buddy Mercer (Ellar Coltrane), who just wants to craft chandeliers out of deer antlers, along with the alienation of her best friend/mentor Annie (Karen Gillan).
Adapting his own 2014 novel, Dave Eggers and director James Ponsoldt (“The End of the Tour,” “The Spectacular Now”) meanders toward ominous melodrama, subtly reducing the fascistic future’s pivotal, high-tech skeptic Ty (John Boyega) to an enigmatic, incomprehensible cipher.
Comparisons with George Orwell’s prophetic “1984,” Alan J. Pakula’s “The Parallax View,” and Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show” are inevitable.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Circle” is a sleekly sinister, satirical 6, evolving into a cautionary tale.
