Sorry to Bother You has
lots to say and uses its time wisely. This is one of those movies
that you can spend much time afterwards discussing what it had to
say. On
an originality scale from 1 to Being
John Malkovich,
it is around 8 or 9 Charlie Kaufmans.
It starts
off in a new place
and then half-way through goes completely crazy.
Sorry to Bother You was
written and directed by Boots Riley. Never heard of him, but the way
this movie plays, it feels like he’s had
half a decade
worth of material backed up in his system wrestling for position at
the floodgates of creative fulfillment. Sorry
to Bother You is
about many things: wealth and poverty, capital
and labor,
ambition and community,
individuality
and conformity,
weird art, wrong-headed genetic experiments, and slavery.
Our hero Cassius Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield) starts with an
existential crisis. He lives in his uncle’s garage and hasn’t a
job. He is simply surviving. What will his life amount to future
generations? (Even when the movie is small, it is big.) Cassius Green
lands a soul-crushing seemingly impossible job at a telemarketing
firm. They will hire anyone who walks in the door. He is not doing
well. Then, a fellow colleague played by a wonderful Danny Glover
(still alive!) gives him great advice. Use your white voice he
counsels. “White Voice?” asks Cassius. Glover explains what he
means. Its not just sounding nasal. It means sounding like you don’t
have student loans, that you pay all your bills on time, that you
don’t have a care in the world. You are who the other person on the
phone wants to be like. Oh, that white voice. Cassius Green
gives it a shot. (He sounds remarkably like the actor David Cross,
best known as Tobias Funke the therapist turned actor in “Arrested
Development”.) This apparently is what black people think white
people sound like. Like the movie in general, it’s too funny to be
truly offensive.
Pretty soon, Cassius’s telemarketing career
takes off and two subplots run right along side his growing success.
The first is that the telemarketing center tries to unionize. This is
led by a guy named Squeeze, played by Steven Yuen, who stages a work
stoppage during prime calling hours. As one character remarks, it is
some very Norma Rae
shit. Having seen
that movie, I agree. The second is that after Cassius gains a
promotion he starts selling a product
called “Worry Free” labor. “Worry Free” is a company that
contracts with regular people to provide guaranteed food and shelter
in exchange for otherwise unpaid
labor. Its not necessarily slavery but Sorry
to Bother You
wants to liken it to such. Obviously, Cassius, being black, has some
qualms about selling slavery to anyone, even if the slaves are of all
races. But he also doesn’t want to be poor loser
anymore and what exactly
is
his responsibility to everyone else?
Then there are weird art show, at least one riot, and the horse
people. But I’m not going to get too far into that. It would be
impossible to explain here. Two more points. First, this is the
second movie this year that puts Oakland, California on the map. The
first was Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther”. It is beginning to
feel like that place is the next hot place to make great movies. If
one more great movie from one great new filmmaker springs from there
in the near future, it would be fair to say its a trend.
Second, is a philosophical qualm. Unlike Boots Riley, I don’t
believe slavery is a particularly profitable or productive way to run
a business. Here, “Worry Free” is making cash hand over fist by
this type of business practice. History disagrees. As the Adam Smith
would say, the problem with slavery (besides all the evil) is that,
because there is no hope of bettering their situation, the workers
are not incentivised to worker smarter and/or harder. Rationally, a
slave will work just as hard as they can to avoid punishment. I’ve
heard this weird argument flitting about that the wealth of America
was produced through slavery. That is a bit like saying the economy
of South Korea was built by North Koreans. If slavery produced
wealth, the world would have been a whole lot richer a whole lot
longer ago. This the truth of the matter. Having said that, Boots
Riley made a great film and Lakeith Stanfield, well, his character
reminded me of some great white characters like Peter Gibbons from
Office Space and C.C. Baxter from The Apartment.
