Another probably otherwise pointless genre teaser

In writer Conrad's directorial debut, Doug (Seann William Scott) assistant manager at a chain store called Donaldson's, must make it to manager at the new branch soon opening up so his wife can continue her medical training and they can make a down payment on a modest house. He is a "shoe-in," till Richard (John C. Reilly) arrives from the store's sister chain in Canada and puts in for the same job. Competition mainly seems to consist of not making a horrible mistake--something neither Doug nor Richard can quite manage--and trying to reduce the number of complaints about the comfort and safety of the parking lot, which is menaced by young toughs. Stuff happens. And in the end somebody wins the job.

Is this a serious film with some comic moments (and overly pushed recurrent jokes), or a comedy that isn't very funny? Or is it an intelligent, "observant," subtly witty comedy that is going to get lost in a field of grossness dominated by drunken Vegas weddings and other "idiot farces," as the Village Voice argues?

Yes, there is observation and some wit here, and a concern with making it while making sense of one's job, as one would expect from the man who wrote The Weather Man, and then The Pursuit of Happyness. But there are also the curve balls and shifts from kindness to cruelty that appeal a lot chiefly to people who like to puzzle over genre.

Like Me and You and Everyone You Know or Mike White's Year of the Dog, The Promotion hovers on the edge of bad-good taste in the manner of all those quirky and rarely successful anomalies that do well at Sundance and qualify for the label of Todd Solondz lite. Typically for such films, The Promotion has its own rather mysterious agendas. Conrad wants to make fun of low-rent motivational tapes; are they even worth making fun of? Isn't Richard's dependence on listening to them when under stress more pathetic than funny?

What are we to make of the way minorities are treated in this film? Why is so much weight given to a bunch of obnoxious and boorish and menacing young men in the Donaldson's parking lot who are black? To lead up to Doug's improbably suave public apology to the local community--and Richard's (Reilly's) gaffe about "black apples"? What about the Hispanic employees who play a crude joke on Richard, exploiting his desire to learn Spanish? Here is where Conrad pushes the envelope, I suppose, a la Mike White.

But Richard is the problem. While Doug at worst is somewhat dorky or at least in a job where it's hard not to seem so, Richard is a genuine, pathetic loser, but one who's trying to make a go of it and has a loving (if sketchy) wife behind him. Yet he keeps messing up. And he's having a rough time. When Doug thinks Richard's conniving with a soft drink delivery person, the truth is he's consulting with his sponsor in recovery, trying to make it through a rough day. Conrad is willing to make a fall guy of a sincere fellow who's in 12-step recovery. Is that funny? This is where he most pushes the edge. But it's an edge that Mike White has consistently played with--only this time, it doesn't quite seem like Richard gets a fair shake. Conrad is cooler and maybe crueler than White.

This battle in a dinky big box store is watchable--it isn't as crazy-making or offensive as Chuck and Buck--but it has none of the drollery of the successful White-Arteta collaboration, The Good Girl, which has a similar unfashionable commercial setting but more going on (Chicago doesn't seem to have proven a very fertile milieu for Conrad this time). Maybe Conrad needs the kind of collaborator Mike White has had in Miguel Argeta, somebody to bounce your dumb-ass ideas off.

As it is, though this is not the feel-bad flick it might have become--but maybe feeling bad might have been good; it's a feeling, anyway. The Promotion has the limitation of its narrow range of characters. Richard and Doug are flat enough as it is; all the rest of the cast are one-liners or visuals. Under the circumstances, such "understated" comedy provides little opportunity for real comedic talent. The movie only adds to the type-casting of John C. Reilly as an increasingly uninteresting loser; at best it may give Seann William Scott hope, if he wants it, of taking on more serious roles; but has he the depth for them? Jennifer Anniston acquitted herself respectably in The Good Girl. But it was a ridiculous, if Mike White-like, decision to cast Lili Taylor here as a Scottish woman with strawberry hair.

It is true that in The Promotion as in other more authentically out-there Solondz lite effots, there is a corollary appeal to some young audiences of humor that may not even know it's humor, or thinks it's funny when it's not, or may miss that it's in bad taste. But redeeming social value this has not. Good try, though, and the Village Voice is right: we need more comedies that try to be different.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.