Directed by: Christoph Waltz
Starring: Christoph Waltz, Vanessa Redgrave, Annette Bening, Corey Hawkins
Rated R, 99 minutes
Truth is often stranger than fiction, but that doesn’t mean the truth is a better story. “Georgetown,” based on a bizarre true story of deceit, power, and murder among Washington’s upper crust, is often compelling in its strangeness, but it’s also roundabout in its storytelling. It’s not a long movie, but a laborious narrative makes it feel longer.
Christoph Waltz (“Inglourious Basterds”) here makes his directorial debut, also starring in the lead as self-made diplomat Ulrich Mott. Mott, with his German accent and mysterious past, climbs the Washington social ladder by marrying a wealthy older widow, Elsa Breht (Vanessa Redgrave, “Atonement”), much to the chagrin of Elsa’s daughter, Amanda (Annette Bening, “20th Century Women”). Together, Ulrich and Elsa host dinners with high-profile guests, from prime ministers to U.S. senators, and found a consulting firm that peddles its services to the U.N. For Ulrich, these dinners and meetings and all the schmoozing that goes with them are his way of conjuring a diplomatic career out of thin air. Elsa, meanwhile, relishes her role as mentor, lending Ulrich her address book and guidance and money. “Mott is young and interesting,” she tells a visibly upset Amanda at a party celebrating their betrothal. “I think he has enormous potential.”
Taking place in the weeks following Elsa’s murder in their Georgetown house and Ulrich’s arrest for the crime, “Georgetown” traces the man’s backstory, teasing out what’s real and what’s invented, what’s genuine and what’s pretend. It’s easier said than done; Ulrich’s exasperated lawyers, trying to assemble a coherent defense, can’t piece together a portrait of the man that makes sense. Why does Ulrich do all the cooking for the large dinners he hosts, acting like a butler in his own home? Why did he marry a woman four decades his senior? Did he really serve in the Iraqi army and the French Foreign Legion, as he says? And did he murder his wife?
These questions are fascinating, and they get much of the movie’s attention, but far more interesting are the movie’s ruminations on power and clout. Vanessa Redgrave, in an excellent performance, imbues Elsa with a bemused curiosity as she shares her wealth and experience with a much younger man, reliving the accumulation of power vicariously through him. Power loves nothing so much as building itself up continuously, and so she uses him to extend her legacy, even while he uses her to create his own. When she finally scorns Ulrich, calling him an idiot and a fool to his face, she takes a certain glee in the derision, as if it were the final power play in a long game of them.
Then there is Ulrich himself, through whose precarious ascent the movie asks whether it matters for power to be built upon lies. If a con man is so good at the con that he can get a meeting with a sitting senator or amass a legion of powerful figures to sit on the board of his nongovernmental organization, then does it matter that he has no actual bona fides? In one scene, he submits a proposal for a peace conference (hosted by himself, naturally) to a group of men who shoot down the idea, but rather than an inclination to ridicule him for pushing his luck, we instead feel Ulrich’s frustration at these men for denying him the chance to do something great. Fabricated or not, power is power, and it exists wherever we choose to put it. The movie is as critical of Ulrich’s brazen Ponzi scheme diplomacy as it is of existing power structures that lack the imagination for anything different.
The problem with “Georgetown,” then, is that it obscures its own musings on power beneath an oddly structured story that gets tangled between competing impulses. Is “Georgetown” a drama about social stratification, a murder mystery about a marriage with ulterior motives, or a geopolitical thriller? It’s some of each, but without setting foot confidently into any one of them. And Christoph Waltz, for all his talent in front of the camera, is an unsure director, his movie technically uninteresting and poorly paced, dulling the impact of every moment except the climax. Like its protagonist, “Georgetown” wants to be a master of everything; unlike Ulrich, it lacks the finesse to pull off the con.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 5/28/21.