The Promotion (***)

What’s so funny about supermarkets? I don’t know, but this is at least the third movie in 20 months that has seen them as a font of comic possibilities. (There was also 2004’s Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!) Employee of the Month was a silly Dane Cook comedy that, just like here, was centered around the competition between two clerks. The British Cashback took a more sophisticated, even existential, approach and mostly succeeded. This movie starring Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly as rivals for a store manager position sort of splits the difference.

Writer-director Steve Conrad, who wrote The Weatherman and The Pursuit of Happyness, veers back and forth between fairly broad humor and straight drama. But that’s also what’s interesting about the movie. Scott’s character is the primary one, but I was unsure if Reilly is supposed to be a villain or not. It turns out that no one is the villain, but no one is heroic either. Who gets the manager job is settled in a way that’s surprising only because it makes perfect sense, the story having set the stage for something wackier. Jenna Fischer and Lily Taylor play the wiser wives of these imperfect men. (Fischer, incidentally, appeared in a 2004 movie called Employee of the Month that’s completely unrelated to the Dane Cook one.)

Conrad has a feel for the way male self-worth and identity is frequently related to professional success. The Weatherman and The Pursuit of Happyness were star vehicles for Nicholas Cage and Will Smith, but also touched on this theme. This is a smaller movie, but it’s just as well-acted and nearly as appealing, though the comedy is hit or miss.

IMDB link

viewed 4/24/08 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 6/17-18/08

Cashback (***1/4)

Dumped insomniac Ben (Sean Biggerstaff), an aspiring artist, takes a job at a supermarket to fill the hours once spent sleeping or mooning over his ex. There, he meets the motley crew and fills the empty hours with imagination. In a lengthy segment that formed the Academy Award-nominated short version of this film, Ben imagines everyone frozen in place. Two male employees are stuck midway through a prank, the cashier is about to scan something, and the (female) customers become nude artists models. (It’s erotic, but not smutty.) The sequence is visually striking, like much of the movie, if slightly pretentious. It’s as if Ingmar Bergman had gotten ahold of the Employee of the Month script and reworked it, saving just the bits about the crazy coworkers and the thread of the competition for the night shift’s lone female. Although it’s very funny in parts—and indeed, funny in the ways that the Dane Cook-Jessica Simpson comedy strived to be but rarely was—it has an existentialist layer as well, with a little magical realism thrown in. The characters, especially Ben, are strong. British writer-director Sean Ellis is one to watch.

IMDB link

reviewed 7/23/07