Manage Your Expecations for ‘Mountainhead’ as a Follow-Up to ‘Succession’: TV Review

Following up “Succession” is a daunting feat — so much so that it’s best to think of the HBO film “Mountainhead” as more of a palate-cleanser than a next act. Written and directed by “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong, “Mountainhead” may share a milieu (the ultra-rich) and a comic rhythm (fast, verbose, profane) with the lavishly acclaimed drama, but it’s much less ambitious by design. Armstrong wrote the script in a matter of weeks, and most of the action is confined, playlike, to the namesake alpine retreat. As if to send a message to the audience, “Mountainhead” even takes that least prestigious of forms: the made-for-TV movie, airing on the very last day of this year’s Emmy eligibility window — like a student handing in their homework right at the deadline.

If one receives that message and sets expectations accordingly, then “Mountainhead” has plenty to offer. Yes, its 109 minutes may be a way for Armstrong to exorcise the last traces of “Succession” from his system. (“Succession” mainstays Mark Mylod, Will Tracy, Lucy Prebble and others are all credited as executive producers.) But “Mountainhead” has its own focus: the destructive impact of technology and the man-children who control it, as if the Roys of “Succession” were replaced by a quartet of Lukas Matssons. Alexander Skarsgård’s self-made entrepreneur was largely used in contrast to the adult Roy children’s inherited, unearned wealth; in “Mountainhead,” the work itself takes center stage, even if its consequences are out of sight and out of mind for its characters.

“Mountainhead” posits the existence of a kind of billionaire fraternity called the Brewsters, who have descended upon Utah for their semi-regular poker night. On the eve of this bro hang, Venis (Cory Michael Smith, of “Saturday Night” and “May December”), the Zuckerberg-like CEO of social media company Traam, has launched a new, deepfake-enabling feature that’s lit a global bonfire of misinformation. Venis jokes that he should respond by posting “fuuck,” with two U’s; his hangers-on sycophantically laugh, even as the new feature stokes sectarian violence by eroding users’ ability to tell true from false.

Jeff (Ramy Youssef) is the inventor of an AI technology that represents “the cure for info-cancer” to Traam’s “4chan on fuckin’ acid.” (The details here are hazy at best; it’s the symbolism that’s important.) But even though Jeff is the Brewster most burdened with a conscience, he’s still less concerned with Venis’ ethical overreach than his shading Jeff for a lack of “founder energy” on a high-profile podcast. Closer to home, Jeff’s billions can’t buy the fidelity of his girlfriend Hester (Hadley Robinson), who’s taken off for an orgy-adjacent gathering in Mexico. “Just because people have sex at a party doesn’t mean it’s a sex party,” she not-really-reassures him. Rounding out the foursome are financier Randall (Steve Carell), who’s in denial about his terminal cancer prognosis, and host Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who’s derisively known as Souper, as in soup kitchen — because his relatively paltry nine-figure fortune makes him “the poorest billionaire in the game.” 

You may have already picked up on some echoes in the prior paragraphs of synopsis. Souper’s self-pity mimics Tom Wambsgans’ assessment of a $5 million fortune as “the poorest rich person in America” and “the world’s tallest dwarf”; Jeff’s jealousy of Hester recalls Connor Roy’s (successful) attempts to buy the loyalty of his paid-escort-turned-wife Willa. Comparisons to “Succession” may be inevitable just a couple years after its finale, but “Mountainhead” also earns them.

But “Mountainhead” looks outward as well as back. I’ll confess to screening the movie not long after finishing “Careless People,” former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams’s tell-all about the inner workings of that company in the 2010s. Venis’ total indifference toward the chaos he’s caused, and his repudiation of responsibility for it, is completely in line with how Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and their colleagues responded to potential come-to-Jesus moments like the 2016 election or the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. Likewise, Randall’s obsession with going “post-human” to live out eternity in cyberspace comes from the same denial of death that leads figures like Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson to seek extreme, often ghoulish means of extending their life. Money can buy so much; why not immortality?

In other words, I’m compelled by Armstrong’s analysis of plutocrats’ broken psychology, especially when their riches come from “disruption” and “innovation.” I’m less compelled by the idea that these people are capable of intimate friendship — let alone that they’d be friends with each other. It’s amusing to watch these men engage in homosocial rituals like scrawling their net worths on their bare chests; there’s even a ceremony for when one Brewster surpasses the other in the only metric that seems to matter to them. For the same reasons, it’s also unconvincing when they profess to care about one another. Armstrong needed a reason to get these people in the same room, but sincere affection isn’t a plausible one.

As a film rather than a series, “Mountainhead” doesn’t have the time to cultivate the psychological nuance or interpersonal dynamics that made the Roys so indelible. (This partly explains the much more established cast, who come in with gravitas rather than slowly build their roles into a calling card.) Instead, “Mountainhead” goes all-in on farce, steering Venis’ callousness, Jeff’s objections, Hugo’s insecurity and Randall’s desperation to their inevitable combustion point. Of the four, Randall comes closest to some kind of pathos with his frantic denial of the inevitable, but when he offhandedly labels Earth a “solid starter planet,” it’s the Muskian grandiosity that bears the comic load.

Armstrong seems to intuit the inherent strengths (speed, focus) and weaknesses (emotion, depth) of his current medium. The ambition of “Mountainhead” is much lower than diagnosing the underlying dysfunction of the privileged few who run the world, settling for putting their dysfunction on caustically hilarious display. But with biting references to moral philosophy, “Ayn Bland” and, in an especially bleak moment, Jamal Khashoggi, “Mountainhead” has the sharpness and erudition to hit its closer target.

“Mountainhead” is currently streaming on Max and will air on HBO on May 31st at 8 p.m. ET.