Photo Credit: Doug Emmett/Sundance InstituteCassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield) takes a job as a telemarketer to make ends meet, and soon finds himself sucked into a seductive world of power and money.
We live in trying times. The news is inescapable and often horrific. There’s a pervasive sense that the world is falling apart around us. In a world like this, it feels more vital than ever to take a stand about something. To have beliefs that you feel passionately about. This is not a time for mealy-mouthed equivocating. It’s a time for action.
That’s why a movie like Sorry to Bother You feels so refreshing. It’s the kind of movie that’s not afraid to be about what it’s about. It wears its heart on its sleeve and its politics on Tessa Thompson’s oversized earrings. From the very first scene, when Cassius takes a dehumanizing job selling worthless junk to people who don’t know any better, it’s crystal clear what this movie is trying to say: that capitalism is an inherently exploitative and unequal system. It takes all the rage it feels about the injustice of capitalism and corporate greed and it focuses it into a two-fisted attack, a glorious assault on everything that perpetuates that structure.
Don’t take that to mean there’s no sophistication to this movie’s story, though. In its 105 minute runtime, it manages to attack the false promise of status to undermine workers, the abuse and harassment inherent to modern media platforms, the naked greed underlying tech saviorism, how the most marginalized in society always end up being the most exploited, and countless other ways the pernicious effects of capitalism manifest in modern society. It’s a truly impressive array of topics, each of them layering on top of and reinforcing each other. It all adds up to an astoundingly thorough critique worthy of any manifesto.
But that doesn’t fully convey just how fun this movie is. Writer-director Boots Riley has an undeniable sense of style, injecting his movie with striking visuals, slick editing, and pitch perfect humor. He’s set his movie in an off-kilter world that serves to highlight the essential inanity of the systems it attacks and constantly ratchets up the tension and the absurdity in tandem. It gallops along at a breakneck pace, building and building until it reaches an insane conclusion that must be seen to be believed, never losing its humor or its rage for a second along the way. It would be an impressive achievement for a veteran filmmaker, let alone a newcomer like Riley.
Of course, there’s no denying that there’s a lot of messiness to Sorry to Bother You. The story is a little shaggy, with some details and digressions that don’t necessarily fit into the larger picture or add to the movie’s message. But its clarity of vision is so sharp, the point of view it expresses so well-defined, that it’s easy to forgive the roughness around its edges. It’s rare to see a big summer movie like this so clearly imprinted with its creator’s vision, especially one so stridently political, and that alone makes it worth seeing. It’s a minor miracle that something like this managed to come out, and it can’t be recommended enough.
Rating: 10 out of 10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeISaoQDh2g
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