The Gallerist, the most high-profile art world satire in some time, centers around Polina Polinski (Natalie Portman), a struggling gallerist on the verge of bankruptcy who’s betting it all on a one-artist debut at Art Basel Miami Beach. The gruesome (and very funny) accidental death of a particularly obnoxious art influencer, Dalton Hardberry (Zach Galifianakis), occurs just as the legendary dealer Marianne Gorman (Catherine Zeta-Jones)—a character with a very similar name to the late gallerist Marian Goodman—appears on the scene. What seems tantamount to catastrophe devolves into a screwball comedy when Polina and her assistant Kiki (Jenna Ortega) conspire to dupe wealthy clients into believing that Dalton’s corpse is part of the sculpture on which he was impaled, titled The Emasculator.
This is the latest film by director Cathy Yan, best known for her the superhero movie Birds of Prey (2020). That means that The Gallerist, which recently had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, marks a radical departure for Yan, though its cast is accustomed to the roles they’ve gotten here. Portman, playing her part with high-strung elegance, is perfectly suited to her character. The ensemble cast is also strong, though Galifianakis, an actor known for his roles in raunch comedies of the late 2000s, steals the show.
Art world–adjacent viewers will likely delight in the deftly satirized milieu, but they may be irked by storytelling shortcuts that don’t ring true to life. For instance, when has anyone heard of a spontaneous auction being conducted for a single piece in the middle of a gallery on opening day? Viewers less familiar with the art world might alternatively be thrown off by invocations of insider terms such as freeports (frequently used by collectors as tax-exempt art vaults), which are underexplained yet central to the movie’s plot. But such liberties are easy to excuse when there’s so much fun to be had.
The Gallerist is good as eye candy: its cinematography is kinetic, poppy, and polished, and its writing tight. But the film ultimately fails to transcend its superficial veneer—it is as entertaining as it is psychologically vacant.
For one thing, the story rests on the premise that Polina is deeply passionate about art—so much so, in fact, that her ex-husband (Sterling K. Brown) repeatedly claims that their marriage fell apart because her devotion to art eclipsed all else. However, the film offers scant evidence of Polina caring about actual art, only some notion of it in the most general sense. She expresses no specific ideas about aesthetics or demonstrates any principles of taste. Even her attempts to sell the artist she represents, Stella Burgess (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), are risible platitudes that could apply to just about any contemporary artist.
Stella is by far the most earnest character in the film, as she constantly resists the uninvited denigration of her sculpture as spectacle. Her favorite work in the show is a modestly scaled painting of a cow. She is not interested in money, and even less interested, apparently, in ending up as a house cleaner in New Jersey. Little by little, she acquiesces to Polinski’s scheme and eventually accepts a gigantic check. The dramatic climax occurs when Stella makes an impassioned speech about artistic integrity in order to distract visitors while Polina, Marianne, and Kiki drag The Emasculator out of view. Stella describes the realization that the final form of an artwork is ultimately beyond the artist’s control: “The thing you thought you made, made itself.” It’s not a bad point, but what artist ultimately thinks otherwise?
The superficiality of this revelation gets at a larger problem with the story: the characters do not evolve to any meaningful degree. Most end up rich, one ends up dead, but none seem to have learned much along the way. Some signs of change among the characters do arrive at the end, when it is revealed that Stella’s beloved cow painting was purchased by none other than Polina’s ex-husband, who had previously been portrayed as a wealthy luddite. To my mind, this scene would have been all the more powerful if we were never shown the painting but rather left to imagine its appearance based on its dearness to the artist’s heart. To show us the work invites the viewer to wonder: So, is that what good art looks like, according to this movie?
Despite its flaws, The Gallerist is an entertaining romp through the farce and folly of the contemporary art world—low-hanging fruit, to be sure, but plucked with panache. Beyond its flashy fun, the film is a genuine ode to feminist collaboration and triumph against all odds. Each of these women have something to prove in a man’s world, and it turns out a fatal encounter with contemporary art might just do the trick.
