The Circle, directed by James Ponsoldt from a novel by Dave Eggers, never really had a chance. The new film is the story of Mae (Emma Watson), who parlays a college friendship with Annie (Karen Gillan) into an entry-level job at a tech company called The Circle. Eggers's novel is techno-utopianism taken to its logical extreme, a world in which the erasure of privacy and a vision of worldwide "connectedness" are presented as a cure for all societal ills. The novel's Mae, who is encouraged by her coworkers to think of The Circle as a surrogate family, is a true believer. So, what went wrong? The speed of tech is now the speed of life, and The Circle arrives after real events have made the film moot as a critique.
The public face of The Circle is Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks), a sweater-wearing innovator who's constantly introducing new ideas at the company's "Dream Fridays". Bailey preaches the vision of information sharing and openness through products like a small wireless camera called "Sea Change", but the sudden humiliation of a Senator who's investigating the company (in an underdeveloped subplot) suggests there may be other agendas at work. It was smart to cast Hanks in this role - he wears his normal good humor like a mask here - but the trope of the tech corporate officer as benevolent creator has long since been deconstructed. In other words, we know Jobs and Gates were in it for the money. While the screenplay (by Ponsoldt and Eggers) never gets too specific about Bailey's darker ambitions, a scene involving a Congresswoman (Judy Reyes) becoming "transparent" (putting her public life online) is presented as the first step to a consolidation of political power. (There's a terrible scene later involving a plan to use The Circle to register voters.) Neither the film nor the novel mention anyone from the corporate world becoming transparent however, and the failure to address how The Circle could get its advertisers to act against their own self-interest feels like a hole in the story's logic. It's worth pointing out here that Emma Watson plays Mae as eager to please but skeptical, a choice made no doubt to keep audience sympathy even when Mae behaves badly. I wasn't surprised that the filmmakers swapped out the novel's ending, but the ending we get is a nothing. The Circle will keep on largely as before, but it won't do all the stuff that made people uncomfortable.
A running theme throughout The Circle is the lack of privacy in a truly connected world. Sea Change cameras are everywhere at the corporate campus and even in the home of Mae's parents. Her father (the late Bill Paxton in his final film) suffers from MS, and Mae trades away their privacy for a chance to get her parents on the company health plan. Mae's friend Mercer (Ellar Coltrane) is a devout off-the-grid type, and the turning point of the film involves his death during the debut of a new Circle application. Here again real life has overwritten what the film is trying to do. What would happen in the culture if someone's death occurred on Facebook Live? We know now the answer to that question is not very much. While The Circle's ability to collect and consolidate information is presented as a threat to individualism - John Boyega plays a Circle developer who raises privacy concerns - in fact an ascendant Circle would probably almost have to become something like the Facebook described in this article. The Circle would be a media outlet run by people who aren't journalists and vulnerable to being co-opted by forces whose agendas it didn't share. The Circle is vague about where Bailey and his partner (Patton Oswalt) might be going, so much so that the misuse of social media in the 2016 election seems even more horrifying. The people who made The Circle weren't prepared for the truth.
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