Far too many adults, in far too many rooms, have far too many repetitive conversations about the arcane ins-and-outs of EU policymaking in Costa-Gavras’ maddeningly unfocused “Adults in…
’ screenplay is concerned, they do not. Instead these characters, whose basis on real people provides only an initial glimmer of interest, and then only for the more dedicated EU governance groupie, mostly act as repositories for intricate, stonewalling arguments of escalating callousness, to which Varoufakis can respond with correspondingly escalating integrity .The span of time covered in the film, though it feels like eons, is only a few months.
His chief antagonist, it emerges, is the wheelchair-bound Wolfgang Schaüble , Germany’s finance minister under Angela Merkel. Schaüble refuses to budge an inch on the MoU, and though Yanis’ articulacy and acumen seem to win him brief support from other big players, such as Christine Lagarde , head of the International Monetary Fund, when it comes to decisions, they end up falling in line with Schaüble, time and again. And again. And again.
Of course, the frustrating, unfair circularity of this whole process is very much the point that Costa-Gavras wants to make, but dramaturgically it traps us, along with Yanis, in a never-ending series of arguments about whether the word “adjustment” is better than “amendment” and the passing of phones and pieces of paper, all staged in two-shot conversations or round-table discussions whose visual potential is quickly exhausted by DP Yorgos Arvanitis.
Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity, though, is that “Adults in the Room” should be such a claustrophobic view of as politically and socially turbulent a few months as Greece has seen in the modern era. The chilling advance resonances of the threatened “Grexit” go untapped. The psychology of the major players goes unexamined. And for all the talk of “the people,” those driven to starvation, unemployment and destitution by the austerity measures forced on the nation are scarcely even glimpsed.
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