Workplace leads to boorish date for needy woman

Some meter maids are men. Thus the line of work leads Jay (Jason Patric) to run into Claire (Samantha Morton). Both are in the business of giving out parking tickets on Los Angeles streets. Claire is a sweet person, who is willing to provide drivers with a break once in a while. She can make allowances. Unfortunately, when she serves tickets, a lot of people are just as mad at her as they'd be at anybody else in her job. She gets the finger, is yelled at, cars sideswipe her. With Jay it's another story. Nasty encounters with furious drivers are barely enough to satisfy his endless need to express pent up anger, and rather than diffuse conflicts, he foments them.

Jay lives alone in a sterile apartment where he masturbates to phone sex arranged on the Internet. It has been a long time since he has had contact with a real woman. Claire lives in a cozy place with her mother (Teri Garr), who is muted by a stroke. They eat Chinese takeout; she puts up decorative lights. It's Christmas.

When Jay starts to show interest in Claire and eventually takes her on dates, the action of this movie grows more cringe-worthy from one scene to the next. The kindly, patient Claire is too inexperienced and needy to be able to admit that Jay is an asshole, or to recognize even when he tells her his story and she sees him momentarily run into his son (whose car he tickets), how weird and dysfunctional this man is. To the audience, everything Jay says is borderline offensive. He is a bundle of narrow macho defenses, unconvincing superiority and that anger.

Jay is trying. He brings flowers. He kisses her. When Claire's mother suddenly dies, he comes over to help. But even moments like this tend to turn rather ugly with Jay, and perverse. Is he helping or exploiting? He has little evident control over himself. He begins to be affectionate and it turns insulting.

Garr also plays Claire's mother's crazy sister; both are fresh and peculiar performances.

Essential to this tale are Claire's and Jay's different performance evaluations at work. If it weren't for those, we might think they're both losers. But one is and one isn't; one is redeemable and the other is hopeless; and the parking department finally tells us which is which.

This is a fairly distinctive piece of work in which the laughs are all uncomfortable. It's also the kind of movie that's very specialized in how much of life it shows us. it's obvious to begin with that people don't very often reveal their positive side when being served with a parking ticket (the film is misleading in almost implying that people tend to be present when parking tickets are given out; of course most aren't). Unfortunately the main characters have problems rather than depths. The mother is plucky, but monosyllabic; her sister is a shrill annoyance. Where are the real people, the ordinary people, in this world?

This is where Patric and Morton come in to save, somewhat, the day. Both are interesting actors bold in taking unsympathetic roles, and both are able to give a texture to their limited characters that makes them troublingly alive, even as facets of a rounded portrayal aren't provided by the script.

There are very minor characters who seem nice, or normal, and one best friend who is helpful and honest to Claire: it's she, along with the parking department, who provides the essential perspective. Indeed, at the end the perspective is perhaps a little too clear. Clair and Jay may have been left in doubt, but the audience has been left nothing to ponder.

Ultimately this story reads as writer-director Cecilia Miniucchi's pitying, but nonetheless very jaundiced, feminine view of certain extreme aspects of the problems men have with women. Neil LaBute has depicted many assholes, but as chauvinistic and boorish as LaBute's men are, they are not as asocial and dysfunctional as Jay.

It's interesting to compare Expired with Delbert Mann's seminal work of pop verismo (written by Paddy Chayevsky), the 1955 film Marty, which is about another lonely couple groping toward each other. Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair are both shy, depressed, lonely people who need someone. Their scenes together are also cringe-inducing, in a way, and now seem rather corny, but the conception of their plight comes out of a sympathetic humanism. Expired is an ugly world that hovers on the edge of caricature--grotesque as it seems, in Marty's terms, to laugh at a paralyzed woman or a hostile sister. It's hard to see the couple's work context as very much more than a joke framework given a realistic edge. It's never certain if we're supposed to be sympathetic to these people and their jobs or distance them, while looking on with a kind of appalled curiosity. Are these people? Well, maybe, sometimes.

Claire begs Jay to be nice to her, insisting that she cares for him. But the more Jay touts his own niceness the more obviously insensitive he seems. Jason Patric's performance is chilling in its spot-on unpleasantness.

It's not so much that, compared to Chayevsky's and Mann's day, these are different times, though they certainly are, as that the contexts of comedy have been so altered that decency and kindness are harder and harder to access through such means.

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