The satire in ‘Sorry’ ably blends reality, sci-fi
“Sorry to Bother You” is about a telemarketer who becomes a superstar, for a price. It’s a science fiction allegory, although the science fiction angle emerges late in the game. It’s a provocative, serious, ridiculous, screwy concoction about whiteface, cultural code-switching, African-American identities and twisted new forms of wage slavery, beyond previously known ethical limits.
Premiering earlier this year at Sundance, the film comes from rapper and musician Boots Riley of the funk-tinged, Oakland, Calif.-based hip-hop band the Coup, who makes his feature debut here as screenwriter and director. I’ve seen it twice now, and while its climactic scenes cave in on themselves, maybe unavoidably, en route there’s a tremendous amount going on, in 17 different directions. Cohesion? Neatness? Neatness may count in the Neatness Olympics, but in movies it’s an overrated commodity.
In 2012 the Coup released an album with the same title, “Sorry to Bother You,” after Mr. Riley had begun wrestling with his script. McSweeney’s published the screenplay two years later, which brought it to the attention of the Sundance Lab. Mr. Riley’s freewheeling comic imagination belongs to itself, first and foremost, the way Michel Gondry’s movies belong to Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze movies belong to Spike Jonze, and Alex Cox’s “Repo Man,” which operated on a similar collision between realism and the fantastic, belongs to itself alone.
Scene One: Cassius “Cash” Green applies for a job. Green’s played by the terrific Lakeith Stanfield, Darius on “Atlanta” and the straw-hatted harbinger of trouble in “Get Out.” The job Green seeks, and finds, requires working the phones at a generically equipped facility somewhere in Oakland, Calif. With
his lover, a visual and performance artist named Detroit, Green lives in the garage of the house owned by his cash-strapped uncle (Terry Crews). Tessa Thompson plays Detroit, who also works as a streetcorner sign-twirler, and here she continues her unerring streak of late. Ms. Thompson is one of the most valuable talents on screen today, and she has a way of making everything matter and mean something, from Valkyrie in “Thor: Ragnarok” on down.
On his first day, Green notices a special, ornate elevator off to one side of the lobby. This is a VIP conveyance, used only by the highest-performing telemarketers, aka the “Power Callers.” Urged by a coworker (Danny Glover) to adopt a “white voice” (”not Will Smith white,” though, he notes), Green suddenly discovers the secret to this job’s success. In “Sorry to Bother You,” one character’s white voice is provided by Patton Oswalt; Green’s comes from David Cross. Truly these are two of the whitest voices on White Earth.
As Green ascends the corporate ladder, his fellow workers (including Detroit, and a labor organizer played by Steven Yeun of “The Walking Dead”) organize a telemarketers strike. The clashes between management and labor are all over the news; in “Sorry to Bother You,” the TVs are tuned either to strike news, a massively beloved game show called “I Got the S — — Kicked Out of Me!” or reports on a strange new lifetime-employment venture called WorryFree, where workers live in hostel-like quarters at factories they’ll never leave.
While Green risks losing Detroitby crossing her picket line as a Power Caller on high, “Sorry to Bother You” eventually reveals to Green (and us) exactly what’s expected of him once he is ushered into the rarefied universe of WorryFree’s CEO, played by a feverishly charismatic Armie Hammer. These later scenes are tricky and a little bit problematic; the way certain creatures are depicted dissipates the tension rather than heightens it. Unlike Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” Mr. Riley’s film risks a fair percentage of its potential audience by making Green a conflicted, compromised figure, i.e., by letting him make his own mistakes. That same percentage of the audience may not take the story’s leap into “Island of Lost Souls” territory.
Well, enough on that. I have reservations about my reservations, because Mr. Riley offers so much on the other side of the ledger. The cinematography by Doug Emmett is unusually vibrant and expressive; so is the editing by Terel Gibson, which sharpens the edge on Mr. Riley’s nuttiest ideas. The movie wouldn’t be the same without the glorious, easy chemistry between Mr. Stanfield and Ms. Thompson, or without day players on the order of Kate Berlant’s telemarketing manager Diana DeBauchery, a memorable mixture of officiousness and lust.
“Sorry to Bother You” may prod memories of such late ‘60s/early ‘70s social-racial satires as “Putney Swope” and “Watermelon Man” (both, and in retrospect pretty obviously, written by white men). “He had a black and white nightmare,” the original “Watermelon Man” posters read, “and now he’s stuck with it!” “Sorry to Bother You” sets up a premise along similar lines — but without the caricatures, or the strident courting of a mainstream audience. Nuts as it gets, Mr. Riley’s movie feels like real life.