Ever since his career defining role in MAD MEN, Jon Hamm has been trying to find a proper outlet for his enormously appealing, yet disquietingly off-center physical grace and commanding screen presence. This little art house film, which casts against type, ain’t it. A debut feature for Joachim Back, it feels like a graduation project by a promising student, designed less to please than to tease with Hamm as a new employee at some anonymous corporate headquarters (widget manufacturers?) where his affect and lack of engagement with fellow desk jockeys seems to place him somewhere on ‘the spectrum.’ But once he locates a secret office space, warm & comfortable/1950s style, hidden inside the sterile steel & glass aridity of the rest of the high rise, he finds he’s suddenly able to fix long intractable company problems. His achievements only slightly shadowed by the inconvenient fact that his special working space may be a figment of his imagination. And yet the results are real enough. There’s a Theatre of the Absurd vibe here, as if Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener took the lead in Frank Loesser’s HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING.* But how do you get out of the set up; how concrete can you make it and achieve dramatic closure? Still, about halfway along, Hamm’s voice-over monologue finds a rhythm and enough clicks into place to carry viewers along.
DOOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *The film of HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING doesn’t do the Pulitzer Prize-winning material justice, but a modest, modernized adaptation of Bartleby the Scrivener from 1972 does. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/04/bartleby-1972.html
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