Stick to the script. Therein lies the moral problem at the center of Boots Riley’s baadasssss new film Sorry to Bother You. The idea is not applied with a light touch, but this is not a film of half measures. The film’s brazen absurdity and searing furor are what makes it such a deftly applied polemic. The frame is engineered to be outsized, outrageous even, but when used to examine current conditions—the debased American laborer, race relations, stupefying wealth in the hands of so few—this funhouse mirror merely distorts the subject, but does not change its core composition.
The plot is ultra economical. Cassius Green is hired at a telemarketing company. Cassius, a young black man who learns to don his white phone voice, becomes a star while his struggling coworkers try to unionize. From there, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You mines its premise of free market woe to such profound depths it unearths something so despicable, so absurd, that the plausibility is impossible to deny.
The film will undoubtedly draw comparisons to other pieces of radical cinema like Putney Swope or even Melvin Van Peebles’s lone studio foray Watermelon Man, but Sorry to Bother You finds a strong spiritual companion in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Gilliam wanted to make Nineteen Eighty-Four for the year 1984 (ugh...why didn’t he name it 1984 ½?!). In kind, Boots Riley has his finger on the pulse of the gathering tech bro messiah robber baron dystopia.
Both films drift from madcap comedy to jarring chaos while never losing the thread, but where Gilliam’s world has already gone off its head, Riley reminds us that dystopia doesn’t happen in a day. As described in one of the film’s many incisive bits of commentary, sometimes you see a problem so big you don’t know how to fix it, so instead of fixing it, you just get used to it.
Among Sorry to Bother You’s many accomplishments, the standout is the film’s strong sense of self. A psychedelic swirl of humor and dread, everything from screenplay to visual identity is fully realized. Even the yipping, shimmering soundtrack by Riley (or his long time rap group The Coup) and tUnE-yArDs isn’t a kind of buried add-on, but another supremely confident key component of the whole. The film is so completely actualized, it is confounding to think this is Riley’s directorial debut. And so it becomes clear,Sorry to Bother You is beyond a passion project, but something focused, dauntless, and urgent.
To further compliment the stellar job handed in by Riley, Lakeith Stanfield is emerging as the scion of our current crisis. Between his fascinating portrayal of Cassius Green and Atlanta’s hustler prophet Darius—not to mention his unforgettable turn in Get Out—Stanfield has an eye for good projects and the chops to make them his own. Side by side with Stanfield is the incandescent Tessa Thompson who plays the role of Detroit, an activist, artist, and generally swashbuckling agitator.
Noticing a trend? Cassius Green, or Cash is Green. Detroit, both racial code word and symbol of American promise gutted by the erosion of labor rights. A corporate yes woman and true believer named Diana DeBauchery. The billionaire silicon valley ringmaster named Steve Lift. The message is not masked, this is meant to be a cinematic provocation. Even the title—where it signals the disingenuous manners foisted on phone bank workers everywhere—is the film’s mordant opening salvo. Though instead of a telemarketer looking to hawk encyclopedias, Riley invokes the familiar phrase to ask; have you pondered any meaningful questions about the structures of class and economy lately?
Where this may seem like a wholesale indictment of the ruling class (and it is), Riley shines a light on many parts of the body politic which have entrenched their position. Viral notoriety, shitty rap music, the VIP room, code switching, it’s all under scrutiny. He asks questions about the efficacy of art as protest. The poor who would cheer their demise as they play banner men to the ultra rich. And when exactly did Italians become white? Funny, infuriating, and fully designed to get under your skin, Sorry to Bother You may not be the best film this year, but it is the film that feels the most like 2018.
Stick to the script. Follow it line by line and you’re rewarded, derivate and you only hurt yourself. A script, a set of rules, a system of law, a hierarchical structure, all born from the same notion of compliance but complicity. Sorry to Bother You knows we’re all culpable, but it wants you to ask acute questions about how far you’ll let it go. Is the looming hellscape telegraphed by Sorry to Bother You really so ludicrous? Competent satire teases out an idea to its most logical extreme, and if a world where corporations have court protected personhood and first amendment rights seems laughable, well, sorry to bother you, but it’s already here.
—Monte Monreal
The plot is ultra economical. Cassius Green is hired at a telemarketing company. Cassius, a young black man who learns to don his white phone voice, becomes a star while his struggling coworkers try to unionize. From there, Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You mines its premise of free market woe to such profound depths it unearths something so despicable, so absurd, that the plausibility is impossible to deny.
The film will undoubtedly draw comparisons to other pieces of radical cinema like Putney Swope or even Melvin Van Peebles’s lone studio foray Watermelon Man, but Sorry to Bother You finds a strong spiritual companion in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Gilliam wanted to make Nineteen Eighty-Four for the year 1984 (ugh...why didn’t he name it 1984 ½?!). In kind, Boots Riley has his finger on the pulse of the gathering tech bro messiah robber baron dystopia.
Both films drift from madcap comedy to jarring chaos while never losing the thread, but where Gilliam’s world has already gone off its head, Riley reminds us that dystopia doesn’t happen in a day. As described in one of the film’s many incisive bits of commentary, sometimes you see a problem so big you don’t know how to fix it, so instead of fixing it, you just get used to it.
Among Sorry to Bother You’s many accomplishments, the standout is the film’s strong sense of self. A psychedelic swirl of humor and dread, everything from screenplay to visual identity is fully realized. Even the yipping, shimmering soundtrack by Riley (or his long time rap group The Coup) and tUnE-yArDs isn’t a kind of buried add-on, but another supremely confident key component of the whole. The film is so completely actualized, it is confounding to think this is Riley’s directorial debut. And so it becomes clear,Sorry to Bother You is beyond a passion project, but something focused, dauntless, and urgent.
To further compliment the stellar job handed in by Riley, Lakeith Stanfield is emerging as the scion of our current crisis. Between his fascinating portrayal of Cassius Green and Atlanta’s hustler prophet Darius—not to mention his unforgettable turn in Get Out—Stanfield has an eye for good projects and the chops to make them his own. Side by side with Stanfield is the incandescent Tessa Thompson who plays the role of Detroit, an activist, artist, and generally swashbuckling agitator.
Noticing a trend? Cassius Green, or Cash is Green. Detroit, both racial code word and symbol of American promise gutted by the erosion of labor rights. A corporate yes woman and true believer named Diana DeBauchery. The billionaire silicon valley ringmaster named Steve Lift. The message is not masked, this is meant to be a cinematic provocation. Even the title—where it signals the disingenuous manners foisted on phone bank workers everywhere—is the film’s mordant opening salvo. Though instead of a telemarketer looking to hawk encyclopedias, Riley invokes the familiar phrase to ask; have you pondered any meaningful questions about the structures of class and economy lately?
Where this may seem like a wholesale indictment of the ruling class (and it is), Riley shines a light on many parts of the body politic which have entrenched their position. Viral notoriety, shitty rap music, the VIP room, code switching, it’s all under scrutiny. He asks questions about the efficacy of art as protest. The poor who would cheer their demise as they play banner men to the ultra rich. And when exactly did Italians become white? Funny, infuriating, and fully designed to get under your skin, Sorry to Bother You may not be the best film this year, but it is the film that feels the most like 2018.
Stick to the script. Follow it line by line and you’re rewarded, derivate and you only hurt yourself. A script, a set of rules, a system of law, a hierarchical structure, all born from the same notion of compliance but complicity. Sorry to Bother You knows we’re all culpable, but it wants you to ask acute questions about how far you’ll let it go. Is the looming hellscape telegraphed by Sorry to Bother You really so ludicrous? Competent satire teases out an idea to its most logical extreme, and if a world where corporations have court protected personhood and first amendment rights seems laughable, well, sorry to bother you, but it’s already here.
—Monte Monreal
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