Enjoyable sci-fi satire in a slightly absurdist world.
Sorry to Bother You
Grade: B+
Director: Boots Riley
Screenplay: Riley
Cast: Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out), Tessa Thompson (Thor: Ragnarok Valkyrie)
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hr 45 min
by John DeSando
“This is telemarketing. Stick to the script.” Anderson (Robert Longstreet)
Sorry to Bother You, even by its title, conjures up negative thoughts about today’s bothersome telemarketing. Juxtaposed with last year’s restrained and impressive Get Out, this film is chaotic about societal concerns that go beyond those annoying calls and into the black-comedy zone. In the end, comic it is, a fun romp through contemporary social problems in an alternate America.
This pleasing allegory, about the cost of making it in a capitalist society gone amuck, among other topics, is best in the first half’s
trenchant depiction of marketing. Besides the indictment of newbie African-American marketer Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield), charming especially with his “white accent,” is the whole idea that money can buy success and happiness. Racism and corruption are all over the surface.
He is promoting a Worry Free program that promised lodging and jobs while masking the slavery it actually involves. The film has started a long and painful arc to the subjugation of workers, who as if in a Swiftean allegory, can be turned into half horses to be stronger and more productive. The satire of greedy corporations and credulous populous is quite relevant given the world Americans now live in.
Although the latter half of the film unspools into a stew of multiple topics, the film has a creative energy that says it can touch on myriad societal topics as long as it keeps moving. It does, and those equinesapiens are scary enough without reading Gulliver’s Travels.
After all, aren’t we workhorses already with suppressed wages and long hours and savage managers and owners? Hooray to writer/director Boots Riley, a musician, activist, and originator of the Hip-hop group The Coup, for being bold about contemporary corporate greed and worker weakness.
Casting over the mash up of horror-film tropes and Twilight-Zone cuteness, Riley has a measure of absurdity that allows all the elements to live in the crazy world we call home. Sorry To Bother You will amuse you, not bother you.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
