2012 (USA)
Director: Craig Zobel
Viewed: August 22, 2012
Format: Digital Theatrical Projection (Landmark Tivoli Theater)
More often than not, the declaration “Inspired by True Events” serves as a marker that the film in question will, in fact, bear little resemblance to reality. In the case of writer-director Craig Zobel’s discomfiting, slow-motion thriller Compliance, however, the resemblance is fairly uncanny, at least as far as narrative features go. Zobel revises the setting from the McDonalds in Kentucky where the events actually took place to a fictional “ChickWich” in Ohio. He also changes the names of the individuals involved, and tweaks a few other details. However, in the main, Compliance is a rigorously faithful depiction of the horrifying events that unfolded at the aforementioned McDonald’s in 2004. (Zobel evidently had plenty of source material to work from: The whole incident was captured on security tape, and was later recounted in both criminal and civil trials.) This makes Zobel’s feature a sort of film à clef, although unlike the usual examples of the form, the people depicted are not public figures, but the ordinary victims and perpetrators of a bizarre crime. That crime was the final, repulsive flourish on one of the strangest telephone pranks in American history, triggering the capture of alleged perpetrator David R. Stewart.
Compliance introduces all of its principals in the first ten minutes or so: Harried middle-aged restaurant manager Sandra (Ann Dowd), shift supervisor Marti (Ashlie Atkinson), teenaged chicken-slingers Becky (Dreama Walker) and Kevin (Philip Ettinger), and Sandra’s fiancé Van (Bill Camp), whose significance to the story only becomes apparent later. The events of the films take place over the course of several hours, on a gray, slushy, but nonetheless busy day at the ChickWich restaurant. One of Zobel’s apparent additions to the tale: A freezer left ajar the previous evening has resulted in spoiled food. The mistake prompts Sandra to dress down her employes, although she pointedly does not report it to the corporate higher-ups. This little character detail renders Sandra’s subsequent behavior marginally less surprising.
Partway through the day, the restaurant receives a phone call from a man identifying himself only as “Officer Daniels” (Pat Healy). He informs Sandra that Becky has been “under surveillance” and that an unnamed customer has accused her of stealing money. At Daniels’ request, Sandra hustles Becky into a combined office and stockroom, and there she forcibly searches the girl’s purse and pockets. Becky objects in a disbelieving, panicky sort of way to both the accusations and the search, but ultimately complies out of faint exasperation. (”Let’s Just Get This Over With” is revealed as the recurring phrase of the film, either stated out loud or implied by facial expressions and body language.) The initial search turns up no stolen money in Becky’s possession, so Daniels suggests—reluctantly, of course—that Sandra perform a strip-search of the girl.
Things… escalate from there, but to reveal more would be to rob Compliance of its potency as a thriller, which relies on the indefinite character of the narrative’s trajectory. The viewer is not entirely certain where the film is headed, save that it is almost assuredly to a Bad Place. There are ample opportunities for the whole nightmare to be brought to a halt, and part of the sadistic cunning of Zobel’s script is how easily these moments glide by unnoticed, only appearing tauntingly in the rearview mirror. It’s a mistake to regard Compliance’s characters as though they were the dim-witted slasher film Meat, whose foolish behavior can be unfavorably compared to one’s own clear-headed thinking. (”I would never have done that…”) Zobel doesn’t expend energy tut-tutting the errors in judgment (and outright criminal acts) committed by Sandra and the others, nor is he preoccupied with sneering at “Officer Daniels” in self-righteous disgust. The director plainly discerns the story’s potential for eliciting an atmosphere of nauseating moral free-fall, and he devotes himself whole-heartedly to the task of crafting Compliance into an unexpectedly evocative, vérité thriller rather than a Grand Statement on the Human Capacity for Evil. (Heather McIntosh’s score, filled with long, wandering passages of bells and strings, assists with this ambition quite splendidly.)
This straightforward approach is both a boon and a curse to Compliance, which is ridiculously engrossing for virtually every minute of its running time, but does little that warrants a second viewing. It is, in essence, a one-trick pony, which is not to say that Zobel’s methods aren’t worthy of attention. The treatment of Compliance’s story as a kind of stranger-than-fiction anecdote staged for maximum effect proves to be a gratifying approach. Zobel manages to strike a capable balance between the absurd and the grave in the film’s tone, all without doing disrespect to the real-world flesh-and-blood victims behind the tale.
The most distracting elements in Compliance prove to be those that detract from the film’s verisimilitude. To wit: One wishes that the film-makers had cast with an eye towards true newcomers. The presence of familiar indie character actors such as Healy and Atkinson (normally a welcome sight) provides a perpetual reminder that one is witnessing a fiction. Similarly, Walker’s movie-star gorgeous face and model-perfect figure seem out of place within the film’s greasy, creased Heartland setting. Casting nitpicking aside, Walker in particular gives a remarkable, vital performance, quite apart from the gushing about her “bravery” that any nudity-heavy role inevitably elicits. Her depiction of Becky’s utter collapse and, eventually, dead-eyed resignation is the film’s most singular, stunning emotional node.
B - Just as Oliver Hirschbiegel’s uncommonly penetrating Nazi epic Downfall pivoted on Bruno Ganz’ portrayal of Adolf Hitler, so too does his tale of the Irish Troubles’ aftermath rests on the shoulders of an actor. However, Five Minutes of Heaven’s most riveting performance isn’t delivered by its most familiar face, Liam Neeson, whose repentant Loyalist now works in conflict resolution. Leonine and haunted, Neeson suits the material well, but the film’s locus is unequivocally James Nesbitt, as the brother of a Catholic man a seventeen-year-old Neeson gunned down. Goaded into confronting his brother’s murderer by a company that engineers reconciliations for television, Nesbitt is wholly mesmerizing as a frayed man who is utterly unapologetic about his hatred and his lust for revenge. Hirschbiegel and writer Guy Hibbert never lose sight of the story’s essential theme of the futility of blood-for-blood, but they are unafraid of exploring other avenues, such as the insidious nature of indoctrination, the toxic effects of grief on families, and, most damningly, the manner in which the media exploits human tragedy and treats peacemaking as just another bit of niche programming. It’s primarily some third act wheel-spinning and narrative goofiness that prevents the film from feeling like an unqualified success.
C - Given that the film plays as a conventional family comedy, the set-up of Laurie Lynd’s Breakfast With Scot requires a convoluted flowchart: Eric and Sam, a straight-laced gay couple, take in Sam’s brother’s dead ex-girlfriend’ son, Scot. Got it? It turns out that the titular eleven-year-old is swishier than his new guardians, which leads to tension vis-à-vis the nominally straight face Eric prefers to present to the world, to say nothing of the perils of raising a manifestly gay preteen. Mild and sweet and ultimately forgettable, the film is strongest when it keeps the focus on Noah Bernett’s oddly charming performance as the uber-girly and somewhat oblivious Scot, and on the paralyzing complexity of Eric’s reactions to responsibility. Unfortunately, the story is unfocused, pivoting between the Gay Story and Adoption Story flavors of melodrama with a distinct ungainliness, and frittering time away on peripheral characters and subplots for thin sitcom chuckles. Ultimately, the film sweeps away all conflicts with the tidiness of an after-school special, which does a disservice to its ostensible aim to humanize the struggles of gay parents and gay kids. Still, LGBT-friendly family comedies are a rare breed, and they don’t come much more benign than this.
B - Equipped with a disarming candor and despairing gaze, Boy A poses a daunting question: Is it just when society prolongs a criminal’s punishment beyond his legal sentence? It gives animation to this thorny dilemma in the person of “Jack,” a parolee who committed a horrific crime as a boy, a deed barely reconcilable with his shy, eager-to-please manner. With his sheepish, adolescent grin and wounded brown eyes, Jack (Andrew Garfield) initially seems prepackaged to tug at viewer sympathies and highlight the cruel manner in which ex-convicts are shunned and harassed by free society. However, director John Crowley takes a nervy approach with Boy A, gradually revealing contradictions and unsettling currents in Jack’s personality and his past, even as he squeezes him between the dooms of public exposure and a violent death. An artistic and thematic inversion of Gus Van Sant’s more daring, heady Paranoid Park, Crowley’s feature traces a path trod by numerous socially conscious dramas about evil deeds and redemption, but it does so with a persuasive, moving tone of anguish and entropy.
B - Perhaps I wouldn’t be so impressed with Chris Bell’s documentary about steroid use in America if I hadn’t been mistaken about what I was getting into. I expected something akin to a television magazine exposé (”Americans use steroids! Oh noes!”), albeit served up in a wry, punchy package. Instead, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* is a genuinely stunning feature documentary debut. Bell doesn’t demonstrate a particularly cinematic sensibility, but he boasts an amazing ability to find the right tone and deftly juggle a deceptively complex controversy. Admittedly, his style owes something to the Moore-Spurlock school of gee-whiz credulity. He asks the occasional sharp question, but mostly nods along while athletes, doctors, advocates, and family members offer their expertise and pour their hearts out. However, his narration absolutely nails a young American male’s strange blend of confusion and cynicism about steroids. Bell takes an empathic and deeply personal approach to the material, looking at it from every angle, never satisfied with conventional wisdom or easy answers. For this reason, BSF* is profoundly satisfying. If Bell can maintain his balance of pithy insight and authentic middle class hope, he might someday unseat Michael Moore as America’s marquee Big Issues documentarian.
A - It is 1987, and in a dingy dormitory room, a pair of Romanian women prepare for a trip of some kind. Who will feed the goldfish while we are gone? Where is the hair dryer? Should I bring my class notes so I can study? The genius of Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is evident in these first few opening minutes. The scenes reveal something about the character of each of these women, Gabita and Otilia, but the portrait is not yet complete. Much more will come to light, about their strengths and flaws, about the casual menace of life in Communist Romania, and about what exactly they are planning. This is a remarkable film about how people achieve illicit aims in a world that is alternately indiscriminate and cruel. This is a film about abortion, and it is the first great movie of 2008.