Sorry to Bother You (2018)

Film: Sorry to Bother You (2018)
Stars: LaKeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Jermaine Fowler, Omari Hardwick, Danny Glover, Steven Yeun, Armie Hammer, David Cross
Director: Boots Riley
Oscar History: It's not that kind of movie
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Few actors working today are quite as exciting onscreen as LaKeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson.  Both are consistently excellent in the work they put to screen, but are in that sweet spot where you know a classic role is coming, something that will become a defining part of their career, but they haven't quite gotten there yet even if they're always memorable.  This was one of the main reasons I was excited to see Sorry to Bother You, a film that I had seen in trailers but was not mentally prepared for as I sat in a silent theater (fourth time this year that I was the only person in a movie theater, a trend I'm not enjoying at all as I want theaters to succeed even if I don't love all of the movies that come out), and while neither of them come out with an iconic role, it goes to show that the faith we have in them can ground even the most unusual of material.

(Spoilers Ahead) Sorry to Bother You is the first feature film from The Coup vocalist Boots Riley, and it has the intense freshness of a promising debut artist.  The film centers around Cassius "Cash" Green (Stanfield), a kind if down-on-his-luck young man who has just taken a job as a telemarketer, lives in the garage of his uncle (who is also about to lose his house), and is in love with a beautiful artist named Detroit (Thompson).  Stanfield's goal at his new job is to someday become a "Power Caller," a seemingly made-up sounding position that turns out to be all-too-real when Cash lands it, realizing that he will now be working for a company called WorryFree, a corporation that essentially provides slave labor to companies around the globe.  In order to become a Power Caller, however, Cash must adopt his "white voice," where he pretends to be a white man on the phone (he is voiced by David Cross while doing the "white voice.").

The film is sharp, particularly in its first hour, as we look at the complicated racial politics of Cash, and in particular take a look at poverty in America that you almost never see on screen or in print.  The New York Times is often criticized for fetishizing a certain kind of blue-collar worker (you know the articles, where they profile the straight, white, middle-aged male who has no college degree, lives in rural Pennsylvania or West Virginia, and uses his economic struggles to excuse the racial politics of a Donald Trump or Roy Moore), but here we see a truly ignored branch of blue-collar worker.  There's no glamorizing Cash's life-his existence is a series of truly dive bars, living not just paycheck-to-paycheck, but overdue notice to overdue notice.  He's smart, capable, but has never been afforded any opportunity and is dismissed by most of society as someone who can be used but isn't really important.  It's not an accident that Riley puts him into a job where he's doing something most of us ignore-a field where we're free to hang up on the workers, or just pretend they don't exist through screening their calls.  Cash is someone that at best is viewed by those in power as a cog to be exploited, at worst a person that doesn't exist.

This is what leads to the bizarre second half, where we meet Armie Hammer's Steve Lift, a coke-addled CEO who is the only person in the film who has actual power, and not coincidentally, is a straight, white, handsome male.  Lift makes Cash a proposition, and here's where we leave the heightened reality of this world and enter science-fiction.  Essentially, Lift's company WorryFree, which is a corporation where you sign a lifetime guarantee of three meals a day and a roof over your head to become a day-laborer (he sells it as "opportunity," but it's obviously blackmailing the working poor into legalized slavery), is a front for a genetic experiment where you combine humans with horses to make mutant creatures that can be exploited and have the strength of a horse but still communicate like humans.  It's weird, and so far out of left field you'll be forgiven for thinking this is a bridge too far.  The film ends with the horse people coming into society, and Cash eventually becoming one of them (having been tricked by Steve Lift into taking the cocaine to become a horse person), and taking back society.

The jolt here is that while Cash risks everything to tell the public about WorryFree's true intent, no one seems to care.  There's a running theme throughout the film of people assimilating and adjusting to horrors when they don't know how to fix them.  While the film will receive comparisons to Get Out that are pretty easy, that picture was a reaction to the racist fallout of President Obama's presidency, a precursor to Trump but not a byproduct of it since the film came out only a few days after the 45th president's inauguration.  Sorry to Bother You, though, is clearly a product of our current era, an acid-hazed study of how people will do anything to normalize a man who would side against America's interests, who would keep children in cages, who would brag about assault or embrace white supremacists or continually exploit the working poor in a way that borders on inhuman. Riley pulls no punches, frequently not only showing a real person's reality in Cash, but also showing what crippling poverty can do to people's lives and ambitions.  We see Cash's uncle willing to sell himself into slavery because he cannot put a roof over his family's head, and we see an interesting look at the "Uncle Tom" trope where Cash is willing to initially sell people out, mostly because he knows he'll be next if he doesn't (until he gets a rude wakeup to this reality when they start turning people into horses, something even his mildly elevated perch as a Power Caller doesn't excuse him from).  The film is damning, nasty, and frequently truthful look at the way that capitalism has exploited people, particularly people of color, in order to create wealth for the few (almost exclusively white men), and in many ways is the most important political film I've seen this year.

Unfortunately, though, it's kind of a mess.  While it's brimming with ideas, it takes too many left turns and frequently under-writes different characters or finds too many metaphors.  Perhaps because there are too many examples of ways the working poor are exploited to count in one film, or perhaps because Riley just wanted to shove all of his ideas into one picture, but the movie is jumbled, and the second half in particular feels sloppy.  In many ways he feels like a combination of Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino, both directors with singular vision but who frequently struggle to pull together their narratives as they expand with ideas.  The characters feel underwritten, and the casting director does a better job of filling plot holes than the screenwriters (Detroit, in particular, feels like she could have been her own movie and oftentimes only exists to serve as Cash's moral compass, which I found a bit anti-feminist considering what a great actress you have in Thompson).  The best parts of the movie, other than the random asides and obvious metaphors (the punching people in the face show that is so loved is clearly a spoof on the NFL, right?), are Stanfield & Hammer, both continually excellent and bringing more depth to these roles than the writers give them.  Still, though, this is way too interesting of a film to ignore even if it feels too full of ideas to be coherent, and Riley has a guaranteed ticket from me the next time he gets behind the camera.