Natalie Portman Is About to Make a Killing

How can you tell if an art show is a success? If a piece sells, the curator typically places a little red dot beside it, letting collectors know that work is no longer available. By the end of director Cathy Yan‘s facile but fun art-world satire “The Gallerist,” there are little red dots all over Miami’s struggling Polinski Mayer Gallery. In theory, that would be any dealer’s dream, except in this case, they’re mostly concentrated in a puddle of blood beneath a human corpse.

The joke, such as it is, of “The Gallerist” is that most people wouldn’t know great art if it stabbed them in the heart — which is precisely what happens to Zach Galifianakis’ insufferable art influencer Dalton Hardberry when he swings by the gallery for an early peek, before the hoi polloi arrive, the week of Art Basel. Polina Polinski (the high-strung title character, whom Natalie Portman plays with nearly the same intensity she brought to “Black Swan”) has been collecting art for years, mostly with her ex-husband’s money. But now that they’re divorced, she sinks her share into transforming a defunct Jiffy Lube into a showcase for uncompromising artists.

Dalton sees right through her, suggesting that her taste in art doesn’t matter. According to him, Polina’s just a gold-digging dilettante who had fun buying art back when she was married, and doesn’t know the first thing about how to sell work to others. Dalton’s words are cruel and uncalled for, though it feels like a cop-out to have him slip on a patch of water collecting beneath the building’s broken AC, fatally impaling himself on an ultra-sharp, 10-foot emasculator (the same tool veterinarians use to castrate livestock, blown up to Jeff Koons proportions). Wouldn’t murder have made for a more satisfying starting point to Yan’s cynical chamber drama?

Polina’s freaked-out assistant Kiki (Jenna Ortega) wants to call the police, but her boss knows that doing so would end her career, so she spins the incident into a publicity opportunity. At this point, “The Gallerist” feels like something David Mamet might have written (then shoved in a drawer), or else, a fairly obvious follow-up to an earlier Sundance movie, the straight-to-Netflix farce “Velvet Buzzsaw.” But there’s a bigger problem with Yan and co-writer James Pedersen’s script: It’s not like the world isn’t going to notice the sudden disappearance of a social-media D-bag with 2 million followers.

If we’re meant to admire Polina’s capacity to improvise — which is presumably a sign of both her intelligence and her survival instinct — then why make everyone else so darn stupid? If anything, the gallerist is the dum-dum here, believing that by surrounding the crime scene with bright orange pylons, no one will examine the sculpture close enough to realize that it’s a real body bleeding out before their eyes.

The intermittently clever movie is full of art-world in-jokes, but seems oblivious to its many plot holes, which are more conspicuous than the slashes in one of Lucio Fontana’s “Spatial Concept” canvases. “The Gallerist” likely wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian,” the ripe banana taped to a blank wall at Art Basel in 2019, which later sold for $120,000 (not an unreasonable price, seeing as how it’s become a symbol for the commodification of art). That stunt made a point, whereas the way people respond to a dead body here doesn’t really make sense, beyond setting up a situation in which a handful of independent-minded women manage to think on their feet, turning a fatal accident into an unlikely succès de scandale.

In addition to Polina and Kiki, who keep rushing back into the gallery’s fancy bathroom to refine their plans, there is Kiki’s aunt Marianne (Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose cool-under-pressure energy helps to balance Portman’s slow-motion meltdown), freshly out of prison, and the artist herself, Stella Burgess (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), whom Polina inexplicably convinces not to disown the work, despite its intention shifting completely when Dalton went and speared himself on it. Described as a “shark,” the scene-stealing Marianne thinks she might be able to interest one of her rich buyers in the “ultrarealistic” piece, estimating a high-six-figure sales price.

For some reason, Polina keeps claiming that the corpse is made of PVC, which she presumably does to deflect suspicion. But the work is only really provocative if the body is real — and then “The Gallerist” might be saying something ethically interesting. By the time Kiki initiates an auction to see how much it’s really “worth,” it’s not clear what the bidders see in it. (One of the easier things to skewer here is how one’s response to art can be so subjective, Polina can spin practically any interpretation to make the sculpture seem legit.) As the turmoil intensifies, Yan’s camerawork gets increasingly agitated, passing through windows and walls, then weaving throughout the space like a drunken hornet.

The movie is full of art-world in-jokes, but breezes right past its many plot holes, which are more conspicuous than the slashes in Lucio Fontana’s “Spatial Concept” canvases. Personally, I’ve only once been to Art Basel, and I can distinctly remember the South Florida dude sitting beside me on the flight telling me how much he preferred Los Angeles (from which we were coming) to Miami: “The people are so much less superficial and shallow there,” he told me, which didn’t quite parse at the time, since those are exactly the words most people use to describe L.A. But then I stepped off the plane and quickly discovered what he meant.

Miami is a place where everything seems fake, which presumably explains Portman’s weird Andy Warhol wig (plus the decision to shoot nearly everything in Paris, passing it off as the Florida hot spot). Scaling back after her misbegotten DC movie “Birds of Prey,” visionary “Dead Pigs” director Yan has assembled a handful of unconvincing supporting actors to round out the cast, from Daniel Brühl as a nepo baby with millions to waste on art he might never look at again to Charli xcx as the only person willing to call this emperor naked. Not everyone makes art hoping to get rich, though the movie raises an uncomfortable question: What’s the point, if we don’t buy it?