From Extract: Office Space director returns to his roots
Film: ‘Extract’ Director: Mike Judge Starring: Jason Bateman, Mila Kunis, Ben Affleck, Clifton Collins Jr., J.K. Simmons Grade: B+
Director Mike Judge has successfully simplified the role of the satirist in recent years, offering refreshing reminders that war and political incompetence are not the only tribulations worth lampooning. In reality, stupidity, boredom and crippling feelings of inadequacy are as unmistakably prevalent as anxieties incurred by those grander terrors. The ever-subversive Judge, who 10 years ago unleashed the now legendary ‘Office Space,’ revels in his role as the comic poet laureate of the nine-to-five comedy.
Having perhaps exhausted his affection for the lowly pencil pusher, Judge turns his attention to that staple of workplace angst he sufficiently crucified in ‘Office Space.’ The boss, here the likable Joel (Jason Bateman), is the proprietor of a sparse but profitable extract-producing facility.
Unlike the employees – and presumably the boss – in ‘Office Space,’ Joel really loves his job, speaking fondly of perfecting recipes with his mother as a child and inventing new flavor concoctions in grad school. Yet his workers are often ungrateful and grossly inattentive. They incidentally injure one of Joel’s finest floor men, Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), when a pipe explodes directly into his nether regions, the legal repercussions of which threaten to ruin the company.
Joel’s formerly serene life is further complicated when a no-good drifter named Cindy (Mila Kunis) stirs things up at the workplace and piques Joel’s desires. When Joel’s mellow bartender pal, Dean (a terrific Ben Affleck), gets wind of his dilemma, he encourages Joel to hire dim-witted Brad (Dustin Milligan) to seduce his good natured but withholding wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig).
In the role of the everyman, Bateman is perfectly at home, flaunting his wry wit and perceptive mannerisms with uncommon ease. Here is an actor to whom theatrics, the melodramatic wailing and flailing favored by our more popular comic actors, are utterly foreign.
Judge has constructed an environment perfectly attuned to that which Bateman explored to comedic perfection in ‘Arrested Development:’ one in which he is free to comment on the cluelessness of those around him. In a role perfectly suited to his strengths, Affleck proves to be a most worthy sidekick, continuing a streak of fine performances in abbreviated roles (‘Smokin’ Aces,’ ‘State of Play’). Where Kunis and Collins Jr. are merely serviceable, the character actor J.K. Simmons – a staple of satires (‘Thank You For Smoking,’ ‘Juno,’ ‘Burn After Reading’) – is dependably terrific. It is perhaps fitting that Judge’s first satisfactorily marketed live-action film is his most restrained, though it is certainly not conservative filmmaking; rather, see it as a more concise ‘Office Space.’
In abandoning the borderline cartoonish humor of his finest film, ‘Idiocracy’ – his uproarious, if occasionally excessive lambasting of Americans’ withering intellect – Judge regains his concentration, and the result is a typically sour, occasionally hilarious depiction of the everyman’s struggles that thoroughly respects its audience. If ‘Extract’ is not as riotous as Judge’s previous efforts, it fits nicely in his canon as a deceptively expert deconstruction of American life.
For all its eccentricities, the picture never feels exaggerated and is ultimately what we have been conditioned never to expect from Hollywood fare: a realistic reflection of concerns about sex, lifestyle and profession, all of which are exhibited by Jason Bateman’s character.
That’s what satire is all about.
Published on September 9, 2009 at 12:00 pm
