Sorry To Bother You
A good satire should bloody your nose a bit. It doesn’t have to knock you flat, but it should definitely leave you stinging. That pain comes from brutal honesty — it might be cloaked in comedy, but underneath that is raw skin and more than a few welts.
Boots Riley’s film — which premiered to high praise at Sundance in January — has a kind of swaggy verve, as if the filmmaker (who also wrote the screenplay) had so many ideas, he didn’t want to contain them all in a neatly organized box.
What starts out as a racial commentary eventually grows to encompass art, identity, tribalism, and the idea of capitalism’s ultimate goal, free labor, which, in this case, involves something called an “equisapien,” capable of doing vastly more work than a human being, with many fewer annoying complaints.
We meet Cassius (Lakeith Stanfield) at one of the lower points of his life: Living with Detroit (Tessa Thompson), his firebrand of an artist girlfriend in the garage of his uncle, to whom he owes four months of back rent, he has little choice but to get a job, in this case with a shady telemarketing outfit called RegalView, under the watchful eye of a lunatic manager (Michael X. Sommers).
Cassius flails about trying to make sales until a committed old-timer (Danny Glover) tells him the key to making it in the biz: Adopt a “white” voice, which he describes, essentially, as someone who isn’t about to lose their house, doesn’t need to make any money, and doesn’t really even need the sale.
After a bit of practice, Cassius finds he has a perfectly attuned white voice (actually voiced hilariously by David Cross), and almost immediately starts racking up big sales, pumping up his standing at the office until he gets bumped upstairs where the “Super Callers” are located, where he then catches the eye of multibillionaire Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), who is so taken with him and his sales abilities that he wants to make him a Godfather offer and an incredibly huge payday.
Lift is a particular kind of capitalist ghoul: The kind of person who has no problem appropriating a cultural patois (“holla atcha boy”) of which he has absolutely no understanding or care; as with everything else, it’s all a heartless means to an end, and the end is to make himself even more wealthy, amassing a fortune at the cost of any semblance of decency. In this, he becomes a perfect proxy representative of society under such a pro-capitalist/any-humanist regime as we are currently enduring.
Cassius’ newfound capital success, however, runs afoul of both Squeeze (Steven Yeun), a secret-agent union organizer, who gets the telemarketing group to strike against the company, and Detroit, who strongly disapproves of his crossing the picket line.
Everything comes down to a difficult decision for him to make: Does he forgo this lucrative career he apparently has incredible talent in, or does he follow his conscience and join with his fellow workers against the company that wants to make him rich.
For most films, that would be plenty enough, but Riley, making his feature debut, is wholly unafraid of opening the fire hose to full blast with his wonderfully reckless energy. Aside from the film’s most out-there concept — the equisapiens — there are so many other madcap ideas floating across the screen, it’s like trying to capture a squadron of dragonflies to explain them.
You’ve got Lift’s primary business, LivingWell, whose fundamental concept is indentured servitude, offering its workers a grim-looking living space on bunk beds (described as “futuristic” in their branding, but looking like a seedy dorm room), and foul-looking “gourmet” meals, in return for their 14-hour work days, and five year renewable contracts.
There’s Detroit’s big art show, which involves her in a seminude black glove bikini, as patrons hurl cellphone pieces, bullet casings, and balloons of sheep’s blood at her.
There’s a TV game show — watched by 500 million people over the world — centered on watching a bunch of dudes beat the bloody hell out of contestants for cash and prizes; or Cassius’ attempt to placate an expectant group of rich white dimwits who want him to show his “rap” game, and the list goes on and on.
Not everything hits quite right, of course, but a surprisingly large percentage does, and with a film as gloriously combustible as this, that’s not a bad record. Even when it seems to go totally off the rails at Lift’s mansion party, Riley is savvy enough to ground even his most absurdist impulses in just enough reality to sell it to us.
He’s aided in this by his cast, who are all pretty solid, but especially Stanfield, who walks as if perpetually about to tip over before his metamorphosis into telemarketing tycoon, and possesses such a winning charisma we’re very much in his character’s corner, even when he turns to the dark side and he handles the film’s more pliable emotional peaks and valleys with deadpan charm.
Most impressively, Riley’s evocation of our current absurd-beyond-measure political climate doesn’t bother to hold anything back. In an era where our leader can literally say anything that comes to mind in front of a rapt cabal of followers, there needs to be voices of dissent, reminding us of just how twisted up our version of reality has become.
There’s a good chance the film will make you laugh out loud, but if it doesn’t, there’s an even better chance it will make you openly sob.