“Downhill,” Reviewed: An Inert Remake of “Force Majeure” | The New Yorker

“Downhill,” Reviewed: An Inert Remake of “Force Majeure” | The New Yorker: Both films are variations on a theme by Ernest Hemingway—specifically, the one in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a 1936 story (originally published in Cosmopolitan) about a couple of rich American socialites on a high-priced hunting trip in Africa, where Francis, in the presence of a charging lion, bolts, in full view of his wife, Margot; the white hunter, Robert Wilson, who’s running the hunt; and the local black men who are Wilson’s much-put-upon staff. Hemingway’s story quickly and deeply parses the couple’s intimate secrets and those of their set, the institutional organization of rich people’s safaris and the staffers who work for them, the psychology of cowardice and courage and the psychic overtones and romantic implications of both, not to mention even the inner lives of hunted and wounded animals. (For the record, a far better cinematic drama than “Force Majeure” and “Downhill,” based on the same theme of Hemingway, is Julia Loktev’s 2011 drama “The Loneliest Planet.”)