Film review: Is Sorry to Bother You the new Get Out?
Annapurna PicturesThe latest film to use fantasy for an ‘eye-opening take on race’ is here. It’s a wildly surreal journey with a destination you won’t expect, writes Caryn James.
When a young, black telemarketer is struggling in his pathetic new ground-floor job, an older black gent working next to him says, “Let me give you a tip. Use your white voice.” That trick turns the young man, Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield), significantly nicknamed Cash, literally soaring to success. Soon a garish, golden elevator swoops him to the upper floors of his company as one of its well-paid ‘Power Callers’.
In most films, that clever premise would be enough to drive a funny-enough comedy. In Sorry to Bother You, writer-director Boots Riley builds layers of social commentary on that simple joke. He delivers a message about the evils of racism and capitalism in a movie that is audacious in form, visually dynamic and often hilarious. As it veers from realism into the surreal, it also becomes the latest in a crop of films and television shows that effectively use fantasy to create eye-opening takes on race and class.
The film begins in a brightly coloured but believable version of Oakland, California, known in the US as a funky, activist city. Cash wakes up next to his girlfriend, a performance artist called Detroit (Tessa Thompson). Hardly anyone escapes a cartoonish name here, an early clue that even when it’s realistic Sorry to Bother You reaches toward the outrageous. Another clue is that Cash and Detroit’s bedroom is in his uncle’s garage – not an attached apartment, but the space where a car ought to be. Any malfunctioning garage-door opener will suddenly destroy their privacy.
Riley deftly inserts fantastic touches into Cash’s familiar, cubicle-filled workplace. When he makes a call, he drops through the floor and lands in the customer’s kitchen or living room. (They don’t see him there, but we do.) He is urging them to sign a contract with Worry Free, a company that will house and feed people for the rest of their lives, in warehouse-style dormitories, in exchange for working in its factories. Cash is basically asking economically-strapped people of all races to sell themselves into slavery.
Cash can be baffled, conflicted or determined, but Stanfield always makes him remarkably credible, often in situations that defy reality. He holds the film together with a combination of naturalness and charisma, which he has only been able to hint at in ing roles in the film Get Out and the television series Atlanta.
Riley constantly pushes beyond the simplistic. At first, Cash questions the advice ing his white voice, saying, “People say I talk with a white voice already.” The older co-worker (played by Danny Glover) tells him, “Not white enough,” all of which s as true. The actual ‘white voice’ Cash uses so effectively sounds like a mild-mannered middle-American suburban dad. Looped into the film by David Cross, his voice is a lot like The Simpsons’ Ned Flanders’.
Through the looking glass
Although Riley’s themes are bluntly, unabashedly on the surface, his flair and witty script save the film from becoming a polemic or a screed. Sorry to Bother You is his first feature, but he has been known as a musician with the hip-hop group The Coup for 20 years (their songs are on the soundtrack), studied film at university and is a veteran of music videos. That experience shows in his assured visuals, which range from gritty Oakland streets to the gleaming minimalist apartment Cash quickly moves into.
Even when Riley’s storytelling approach is conventional, his use of images is inspired. Cash’s car is so decrepit that it has no windscreen wipers. Driving in the rain, he sticks his hand out of the side window and pulls a rope back and forth across the front – one of many small sight gags. More substantially, when he talks about of his high-school football team, who went on to be meandering failures in life, a team photograph appears. Later, a simple flash of memory brings back the photo and instantly signals why Cash is so determined to succeed at his job.
His success is strewn with obstacles, of course. A colleague named Squeeze (Steven Yeun from The Walking Dead) tries to unionise the company, with Detroit as an ally. Cash needs money, but how much of his identity is he willing to sacrifice to get it?
That question becomes more acute when the dystopian, futuristic plot gives way to the purely fantastic. Armie Hammer arrives as Steve Lift, an eccentric executive who wears a suit jacket with a sarong. He makes a wild proposition to Cash, vaulting the story far from its realistic roots, but not far at all from its central themes.
That strategy of using the surreal to make subtle social comments is one of the most potent on screen today. Donald Glover uses it brilliantly in Atlanta, which has featured large crocodiles as pets and Glover (in whiteface-makeup) as a black musician similar to Michael Jackson named Teddy Perkins. The surreal is used sparingly in dream sequences and memories in Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal’s soon-to-be-released Blindspotting, a comedy with a serious soul about a black man trying to stay out of trouble in his last days on probation. As in Sorry to Bother You, these imaginary episodes of racial bias become more visceral than realistic dialogue might have been.
Sorry to Bother You is so strong in so many ways that its major lapse is easy to ignore. The characters around Cash are seriously underwritten, which is especially disappointing in the case of Detroit. Thompson is always dynamic on screen, but Detroit should be more than a cardboard figure who represents rebellion as an alternative to selling out.
Thompson does have one unsettling episode, a performance-art piece in which Detroit asks the audience to throw things at her. In the world of Sorry to Bother You, one of the most popular television programmes is a game show that asks contestants to be punched in the face. These scenes of violence as entertainment may feel like asides, but they are among the many strands that inform the film’s not-so-different alternate reality.
Such discomfiting moments are deliberate and rare. Riley shrewdly balances the serious and the comic in a timely film that manages to be both fierce and hugely entertaining.
★★★★☆
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