The Gallerist: Natalie Portman & Jenna Ortega Lead Messy, Absurd Take On Art & Ambition

Ambition is a hell of a drug. In Cathy Yan's The Gallerist, which premiered at Sundance last weekend, two women trying to make it in the art world compromise themselves for the sake of their career goals. In this satire, they are at once stand-ins for the villains of capitalist America we love to demonize, and also the complicated and desperate victims of the same system. They are the ones who show up every day to industries that were built to exclude them, who smile through the microaggressions, who morph themselves into whatever shape will finally get them a seat at a table they're not even sure they want anymore. But they’re also complicit, cutthroat, and shameless. It’s hard not to root for their success (we support women’s rights and wrongs) and that says as much about us, the audience, as it does about them. Yes, these women are trying to sell a dead body as art, but that's almost beside the point.

Natalie Portman plays Polina Polinski, a Miami gallerist whose desperation is palpable from the first frame. She's running on fumes and a divorce settlement, trying to prove she belongs in an art world that treats her like she's playing dress-up (and she kind of is). When an obnoxious influencer (Zach Galifianakis, delightfully punchable) dies in a freak accident at her gallery, Polina decides to pass off his corpse as an exhibition centerpiece. Naturally. The original piece’s artist, played by the criminally underused Da’Vine Joy Randolph, is appalled by the update, but falls into the seduction of attention and success the body brings. Plus, the dude was kinda racist so good riddance. Polina’s assistant Kiki, played by Jenna Ortega with a twitchy, anxiously mortified energy that is a nice departure from the deadpan delivery we know her for, is also easily seduced by the lure of notoriety. The premise is absurd, purposefully, but Portman's performance is the perfect mix of grounded and camp. She’s conveying Polina’s desperation to succeed, to be seen, to matter and how that cocktail of insecurity makes her do unhinged things. The movie wants us to relate to her, and to believe that we're all just one bad day away from Weekend at Bernie's-ing our way through a crisis. The strength of The Gallerist is, at times, I almost did. 

The Gallerist is only partially about Polina's solo descent into madness. It's also about the relationship between Polina and Ortega’s Kiki. The dynamic between Portman and Ortega crackles with a specific kind of tension — the older woman who sees her younger self and resents it, the younger woman who sees her future and fears it. They need each other, they're using each other, and somewhere underneath all the scheming, they might actually care about each other. It's complicated and uncomfortable and compulsively watchable. 

The film isn't perfect; the plot gets increasingly ridiculous (though that's kind of the point), and some of the satire is a bit on-the-nose. But Yan's direction keeps things visually interesting, and the supporting cast is having the time of their lives. Charli XCX brings humor and heart to an otherwise one-note character (she’s Galifianakis’ suspicious, vapid girlfriend). Sterling K. Brown plays clueless bravado perfectly as Polina’s ex husband. Randolph brings warmth as the artist caught in the middle of this chaos, also bringing depth as a Black woman caught up in white mess. The script may not give her much, but Randolph runs with it and with every side eye and skeptical stare, she tells us a lot without saying much. In the art world, Black women are trotted out, tokenized, and exploited with little thought given to their wellbeing. And Catherine Zeta-Jones steals every scene as Kiki's aunt Marianne, a woman who's already played the game and won by deciding morality is for people who can afford it. 

There's a scene late in the film where the three women — Polina, Kiki, and Marianne — are frantically trying to pull off their scheme before everything falls apart, and I realized I was watching three generations of women in the art world, each one more jaded than the last, each one doing whatever it takes to survive. The film asks: what happens to women when the only way to succeed is to become the thing you swore you'd never be? And more specifically, what happens to young women when the mentors they look up to teach them that compromise is just pragmatism, that selling out is just growing up, that the price of admission is everything you thought you stood for?

I left the theater thinking about all the Polinas and Kikis I've known, myself included. The ones who showed up to spaces that didn't want us and tried to play by rules that were designed to keep us out. The ones who looked at other women—especially other women who'd "made it"—not as allies but as competition, because that's what survival mode does to us.

The Gallerist is messy, dark and wickedly funny, but mostly it's honest about the fact that sometimes the biggest obstacle to women succeeding isn't the patriarchy, it's the women who've internalized its logic and are now perpetuating it on the next generation. Portman and Ortega's chemistry makes you root for them even as you're horrified by their choices, which feels about right for a film about what we're willing to sacrifice to matter. It's not a feel-good movie about women supporting women. It's a much more complicated, uncomfortable portrait of what happens when "making it" costs everything, and we decide to pay the price anyway.