When the World Cracks Open and Ordinary People Are Left Holding the Pieces
The world’s reception of Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind could nicely capture the world’s reception of Esmail’s screenplay: the world was experiencing pandemic fatigue and a myriad of unresolved geopolitical tensions. What, after all, could the world’s new normal look like? The Sandford family’s seemingly trivial escape to a high-end Airbnb served as a striking metaphor of the unnervingly slow world collapse of modern life, and predicts the distant reality that so many of us are trying to avoid.
The film’s heartbreak stemmed, above all, from the performances of the Sandfords’ phantophobia shadows, Amanda and G. H. Scott, as we (Sandfords and the audience) all evacuated to the modern, militarily-domesticated world together. Real lives, real pains, and real moments of panic all served to make the audience feel the reflection of a society fully unprepared for the collapse of their solid, grounded, predictable world.
The Many Layers of Amanda Sandford: A Woman Fighting Her Own Shadow
Julia Roberts’ Amanda is one of the film’s emotional bedrocks. She is portrayed as sharp, paranoid, overprotective, and deeply flawed, no doubt pulling from a familiarity with the character. Amanda was the most triggered during the mysterious blackout and, even while most of the other characters had withdrawn to the safety of the control room, Amanda stayed behind control rooms and refused to lose control, even as her mom hated and distrusted G.H. and Ruth.
The character’s bedrock is her discomfort with the certainty of variables and the unpredictable. This, ironically, is also true of Roberts. For most of her professional life, she was the lead of 90’s romcoms: an eternally glowing, cheerful, and calm presence. However, in a few interviews prior to the movie’s release, Roberts was clear that she was hoping to find character’s that subverted her established persona. For her, taking on the role of Amanda was the equivalent of the peeling of the final outermost layer of America’s Sweetheart and the taking on of a much darker, far more complex, and emotionally challenging interior.
As part of an extensive prior prep of the character, she has grounded Amanda in journaling, where she wrote long entries about Amanda’s worries, motherhood, and the crumbling need to have everything in control. Roberts described Amanda as someone who \”talks a lot, but is very shallow in that regard and has so much layered fear under the surface.\”
The emotional arc of the character is ‘restraint’ as she is confronted with the emotionally uncomfortable truth that the world doesn’t come to an end from external conflicts and struggles heavily on the outside.
The Quiet Strength of G.H. Scott: A Modern Man in a Roaring Crisis.
As a polar opposite, Mahershala Ali’s G.H. Scott is the eye of the storm. While she is frantic Amanda, G.H is calm and rational. While she is emotionally reactive, G.H. is quiet. While she is emotionally guarded, he is simply reflective. He not only brings tension but also grace, mystery, and an air of dignified understanding of the more obvious world fractures that he has more than enough control of.
Ali’s preparation for G.H. is part of what makes him such a complex character. He spent weeks trying to embody the confidence of a man who is self-made through hard work and intellect by conversing with financial advisors and architects. However, the character was personal for Ali as well, as he grew up watching the way Black men were treated in high-pressure situations and the responsibility that came with that.
In interviews, he mentioned that he wanted G.H. to have, “a patience that comes from experience — from knowing you cannot afford to be the one who panics first.” He created a subtle tension in his character that, while the world is burning, the fire of the world is not in his hands. This is particularly evident in his scenes with Amanda, where this tension is especially contrasted against the emotional weight of the moment.
Ali’s character portrayed a quiet heartbreak of the film in the way he depicted the character arc from tightly bound self-control to exasperation in the realisation that even he cannot solve the puzzle.
Before the film was even released, one of the most anticipated aspects was the casting of Julia Roberts alongside Mahershala Ali — a pair of Oscar-winning actors who had never before acted together.
Rather than the expected emotional fireworks, the fans received the more intriguing, yet somehow emotionally restrained, portrayal of two people inter-personally circling one another in electric tension, as if mid-crisis to which neither participant holds the key to resolution. During the emotionally-layered conversations in the house’s dim corners while the world beyond unravels, the characters in these scenes portrayed through the fans’ favorite of the isolated narratives.
Social media users relished one moment in particular, when G.H. countered Amanda’s distrust with tenderness. Although the moment’s silence contained unspoken tensions, the silence did not include the tensions of race, privilege, and fear, which together formed the elements of one of the most favorite social media scenes, thereby illustrating the point that the film’s most significant explosions were not the screen’s visual effects, but emotions.
Teenagers in a Grown-Up Apocalypse
While the adults are perpetually squabbling, wrestling with their overdeveloped issues of pride and paranoia, the film’s younger actors candidly express and present the film’s core raw emotional truths, such as in Ethan Hawke’s portrayal of Clay as the dependable husband, to the audiences through the characters of children, Rose, Danny, and Archie, who can only witness the chaos with innocent and terrified expressions.
Of all of the characters, Archie’s is perhaps the most significant. His evolution from borderline apathetic, screen-addicted teen to someone who is forced to actively confront his powerlessness as the world falls apart is nothing short of extraordinary. Evans has spoken about how his character hinges on the archetypal teenage fear of losing control, particularly at a moment where there is significant geopolitical unrest and where, a real teenage audience from the world is invited to lose control. Evans’ shocking ‘tooth scene’ is the only one filmed with practical prosthetics, and Evans has since explained that the terrifying look on his face was the result of ‘50 percent actor, 50 percent literally hating the feeling’.)
A Director with a Strong Preference for Questions over Answers
Sam Esmail’s engagement with the film is characterized by a unique sense of ambiguity. Having produced Mr. Robot, he likes to construct an audience off-kilter world, and ‘Leave the World Behind’ beautifully plays with that discomfort.
During shooting, Esmail had all of the actors do several takes of the pivotal scenes, but with different emotional inflections. Roberts described how, for the scene with the deer surround the house, there were at least five emotional inflections done, from one of the center emotions panic, to one of awe, to one of confusion and only at the final stage of editing did Esmail decide on the emotional center for that particular moment.
Another amazing moment behind the scenes was filming the drone-shot sequence showing the flaming oil tanker spinning towards the beach. There were several rehearsals with small models before the VFX staff built the final version that went viral on the internet.
When viewers were left to argue amongst themselves long after the credit scenes
The film did not present itself with tidy conclusions – and that was the film’s strength. And the theories were rampant on the internet. Was the catastrophe the result of political sabotage? Cyber warfare? Aliens? Some symbolic collapse of modern civilization? The film embraced ambiguity and allowed viewers to confront their own fear.
And it is maybe the reason the characters felt so real. Amanda, G.H., Clay, and Archie they all reflected us – our defensiveness, our denial, our desperate survival, our prejudice, our hope.
Eventually the film named Leave The World Behind became less about what was happening around the characters and more about what happens to us when the world stops making sense. And that is the reason the characters along with the actors whose lives were actually inspired by the characters won’t stop resonating with us even after the film ends.