Compliance (***1/2)

Just because something really happened doesn’t mean people will believe it, and that’s the only problem with this movie, which, nonetheless, a lot of people might benefit from seeing. It begins with a giant “based on real events,” which as often as not signals a story that heavily departs from reality, but, based on a little post-movie reading about the case, and ABC News footage from a 20/20 investigation, it would appear that this sticks pretty close to what happened in a McDonald’s restaurant—here styled a “Chick-wich”—in a Kentucky town. The film is done in a quasi-documentary style, and even the first few minutes of it give off the familiar vibe of what it’s like working in a low-wage retail establishment.

It is better not to give too much of the story away, but it begins with the manager of the restaurant (Ann Dowd), an ordinary-seeming middle-aged woman, getting a call. The caller states that he is a police officer, and that a patron has accused the young cashier there of stealing. This leads to an increasingly unpleasant experience for the young woman (Dreama Walker). Without giving more away, it’s worth noting that nothing than happens to her is worse than what happens to victims of violence in many a popular thriller, and yet I suspect that most people will feel as I did, much more squeamish watching this.

I saw the movie at a screening the other night. I was near the front and didn’t see, but the person leading a Q&A afterward said there were a few walkouts. I heard a few cries of “she is so stupid” and such even during the movie. The discussion was polite, though. I made a comment about the Milgram experiments as well as the tricks “psychics” use to elicit information from their marks and then feed the same information back to them to gain trust. The caller does that in the movie. I also disagree that the restaurant manager in the 20/20 piece is necessarily lying. She may be, but people’s memories have a funny way of reconstructing things in a way that makes sense to them. Her doing something so awful doesn’t make sense to her. 
 
But someone wants to know why anyone wants to see this. I would say, why does anyone want to see a movie like Saw III, in which we are somewhat made to identify with the torturer? Here we identify with the victim, and it makes us (me, at least) incredibly squeamish. Yet what happens to the girl is no worse than what happens to victims of violence in many a thriller. Why do we not feel so awful in these kinds of movies? Is it that they don’t seem real, that we are desensitized to that kind of violence, or that those movies attribute most or all of the bad behavior to outright villains, whereas this movie has seemingly ordinary people doing the ordinary things. 
 
I think it would be great if a lot of people saw Compliance, which reminds us that movies can present idealized models of human behavior, and reality is a lot more complex. 
 
By the way, the epilogue to the film [spoiler, sort of] tells us there have been many such incidents.

IMDb link

viewed 8/15/12 7:30 at Ritz Bourse

Fast Food Nation (***1/4)

? When Don Anderson (Greg Kinnear), a rising star from the corporate headquarters of “Mickey’s” orders his company’s “Big One” signature burger at an outlet in the hinterlands, the cook gives him the old spit-in-the-meat. But it turns out that extra-special sauce may not be the worst thing he’s ingesting. The problem, as his boss puts it, is “there’s shit in the meat,” and Don has been sent to check out the Colorado packing plant that turns cows into frozen patties. The ever-versatile Richard Linklater, whose A Scanner Darkly came out just a few months before this, here collaborated with author Eric Schlosser to turn the latter’s non-fiction best-seller into Dan’s story, as well as those of Amber, a low-paid cashier at the hinterlands Mickey’s, and Sylvia, one of the many undocumented Mexicans who form the plant’s compliant labor force. After all, to get beef to wholesale at 40 cents a pound requires efficiency at every step of the fast food chain.

+  Linklater and Schlosser have generally done a good job in creating a storyline that doesn’t simply feel like a documentary in disguise. It helps that some of the juiciest morsels of information are delivered by the likes of Kris Kristofferson and Bruce Willis, colorful in small parts. Sylvia is played by Maria Full of Grace’s Catalina Sandino Moreno, and TV actress Ashley Johnson seems natural as high-school student Amber. Without seeming too heavy-handed, or using one-dimensional characters, Linklater shows how both people and animals become commodities in the same system.

- Don, the corporate guy, disappears from the movie for about an hour, right when his story gets interesting. You can surmise what happens in the meantime, but probably another few minutes, or different editing, would have balanced things out.

= ***1/4 It didn’t bother me that the characters in the three storylines barely intersect, because that’s part of the point, but it’s something some people probably won’t like. Nor are tidy endings and sunny optimism to be found here. (There is occasional humor.) The characters in Fast Food Nation each have to deal with facts that it would be easier to ignore. A lot of people probably won’t want to watch this movie for the same reason, but anyone who’s ever eaten beef that comes from a commercial meat packing plant should watch at least the last ten minutes, a brief but unpleasant tour of the “killing floor,” filmed in a real meat-packing plant, that shows what it takes to turn massive numbers of cows into pieces of meat. This is the flip side of Super Size Me, which looked at a key element mostly missing from the movie’s recipe, the consumer. But anyone who pays attention will supply that ingredient himself.

IMDb link