Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead, a paean to capitalist self-interest, has become a bible for right-wingers and entrepreneurs from Donald Trump to Steve Jobs. In his latest skewering of the super-rich and his first feature film as a director, Succession’s Jesse Armstrong borrows the title of Rand’s book for a Bond villain-style lair where a group of amoral, mega-powerful tech magnates watch a global crisis unfold, one that they insist they aren’t at all responsible for.
We find host Hugo (a wonderfully weaselly Jason Schwartzman), aka ‘Souper’, waiting at Mountainhead for his friends to arrive and praying one of them will “bust a B-nut” (i.e. invest a billion dollars) in his new wellness app. But his guests have more pressing matters on their minds. Elon Musk-alike Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the richest of the quartet, has unveiled a generative AI feature on his social-media platform that’s spreading disinformation and causing intense IRL violence across the world. Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a rising star with a shred of a conscience, could quell all this political unrest with his improved AI system but refuses to sell it to long-time frenemy Venis. And finally Randall (Steve Carell), known as ‘Papa Bear’ and ‘Dark Money Gandalf’, is desperate to achieve ‘trans-human’ immortality after a terminal-cancer diagnosis.
All four leads are having a whale of a time with Armstrong’s deliciously nasty script, which is peppered with the douchiest tech-bro banter known to man and cringey faux-intellectual debate.
As Succession fans might expect, in this all too topical black comedy, some frat-bro joshing, including trekking to a mountaintop where Souper writes their net worth on their chests in lipstick, escalates into brutal backstabbing and genuine attempts at world domination. Virtually every scene takes place inside this concrete-grey monstrosity (“Was your interior decorator Ayn Bland?!”), the cold seemingly seeping into the very walls, or on the surrounding snowy mountain range.
All four leads are having a whale of a time with Armstrong’s deliciously nasty script, which is peppered with the douchiest tech-bro banter known to man and cringey faux-intellectual debate. Cory Michael Smith continues to impress after his small role in May December, inflecting Venis with a profoundly pathetic loneliness beneath his bluster, and Carell effortlessly oscillates between warm patriarch and ruthless assassin. Although the film is heavy on talk and light on action, it’s perversely pleasurable to spend time with these hollow scumbags who perceive real people’s lives as “fungible human assets”. The power wielded by these overgrown teenage boys, desperate to be adored, would seem ludicrous if it didn’t feel so painfully true. It’s hardly subtle, but it speaks to the unsubtle times we’re living in.