Cult comedy
helmer Mike Judge’s films have always put me to sleep, what with
their comatose, middling tones and apathetic characters. But
don’t jump on me for that just yet. Yes, I understand Judge’s
trademark style is very much part of the point – to represent
the boredom and inanity that often plagues working-class life
and, in turn, makes people stupid. But, aside from Beavis and
Butthead—where that message rings oh-so-true from the get
go—I don’t find that Judge’s films have the substance to back
the style up. In other words, had Office Space or
Idiocracy told me anything profound about why they
looked and flowed the way they did, beyond surface ideas and
cheap laughs, then perhaps I would have thought more highly of
them.
With
Extract, Judge finally has the material to support his usual
presentation, both in terms of social commentary and comedy. But
you might have to look twice to notice just how profound the
movie can be, because damn, the pace is still as reflective of
the Middle American laborer’s plight as could be.
But again,
Extract is observant and snarky in all the right ways. For
evidence of this, look no further than the first character the
audience meets, Cindy (Mila Kunis). Strikingly beautiful, she
leaves two music store sales reps speechless as she inquires
about a potential birthday gift for her boyfriend, only to send
them to the back so she can steal a guitar to pawn. In this
relatively simple opening, Judge breaks a lot of ground. When
was the last time we’ve seen a woman as drop-dead gorgeous as
Kunis portrayed as a downright bad person? Outside of “evil”
comic-book villains like Sienna Miller’s Baroness in the recent
G.I. Joe (who we end up liking anyway despite their awful
plots), we rarely see an attractive female portrayed as just
everyday, no-frills bad. This immediately brings Judge’s
commentary on what working-class life can do to people
front-and-center: Cindy might look like an A-list celebrity, but
she’s no better for it than any of her uglier counterparts.
That’s not to
say Judge demonizes the virtue of working one’s way up in a
capitalist society; in fact, that he has made so many comedies
on the topic shows that he values the ideal at least to some
extent. (That said, he does frequently acknowledge the
unavoidable fact that certain people are destined to stay at the
bottom of the totem-pole.) Capitalism per se has worked well for
protagonist Joel (Jason Bateman), who Cindy goes to work for in
an elaborate plot she schemes up to scam a co-worker out of
malpractice earnings. Joel owns a profitable factory that
manufactures the title liquid additive. Despite his eagerness to
sell to a big corporation, Joel is a well meaning business-owner
who’s passionate about what he does, employing a lot of
otherwise-talentless folks and treating them fairly. As much as
Extract shows that it can be ugly and stupefying to be
“the little guy” in America, it’s just as often a pleasant
rebuke to all of the recent news headlines victimizing He who
turns a profit.
And then
there’s the little, perceptive details of the movie that ring
true, many of them taking me back to the days I worked for
minimum wage at the local multiplex with a cast of similarly
depressing and, in several cases, just plain dumb
characters. Take, for instance, Mary (Beth Grant), the factory’s
conveyor-belt operator, who has it in for the new Mexican
employee. She fails to do her job whenever he gets behind, so as
to punish him by forcing pallets of extract to collide and
climactically fall off the assembly line. Dare I assert the
subtle, humorous way Judge conducts these scenes says a lot more
about the state of racism in the American workforce than
didactic works all about the subject, like Crash? If
that’s too stretched a suggestion for you, then what about the
couple of scenes in which Judge muses at how dependent on
exorbitant amounts of Pepsi some of us have become? You can’t
find a more corporate product than the two-liter bottle of soda,
and yet the very same folks who embrace this technology the most
are those who get pissed when corporations become so efficient
they no longer need them as workers. This is telling,
interesting material for a film that has been billed as a
lighthearted comedy.
However, I
will not neglect mentioning that Extract is indeed, at
its heart, a comedy that’s often very, very funny. Most of the
big laughs come from a plot Joel devises over a drug-addled
night with the overly friendly local Marriot hotel bartender,
Dean (Ben Affleck). Convinced that the deceitful Cindy has the
Hots for him and that his longtime marriage with wife Suzie
(Kristen Wiig) is on the rocks, Joel decides it’d be OK for him
to pursue an extramarital relationship with the hot
twentysomething if he knows Suzie would do the same. He accepts
Dean’s offer to hire a male gigolo—really the dumb-as-a-doornail
young “landscaper” Brad (the very promising Dustin Milligan)—to
pose as the new pool-boy and tempt Suzie into sex. Needless to
say, Brad knows nothing about pool-cleaning and Suzie is a lot
hornier than Joel might like to think. Some—namely Roger
Ebert—have doubted the plausibility of these scenes, even in the
film’s comic realm, but I never even questioned them. I laughed
the whole way through—harder than I have at any movie all year
during one sequence.
Then there’s a
role that the Gene Simmons sinks his teeth into more than
Mike Tyson did his riotous turn in The Hangover, but it
has to be seen to be believed.
And yet, as
good as Extract seems in retrospect, I’ll admit I’ve left
movies I’ve liked less feeling more enthusiastically. Judge’s
style really represents a Catch 22: it’s necessary to set a
template of working-class life in his films, but working-class
life is indeed so utterly boring that it can’t help but make the
thinking viewer get impatient. The only crowd it clearly works
for is the fan-boys who love Judge’s surface jags, like the
over-quoted stapler line in Office Space. This is
especially interesting to consider within the context of
Extract, which has so few of said jags, especially if you
take the Affleck character out of the picture. Nonetheless, it’s
an unexpectedly dense movie once one works through Judge’s
signature tone, offering rewards aplenty. I might not have been
gushing immediately after I saw Extract, but I certainly
am now, as I think about Judge’s growth as a filmmaker and how
his future projects will reflect it.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 9.7.2009
Screened on:
9.5.2009 at the Edwards San Marcos
18 in San Marcos, CA.
Extract is rated R and runs 90 minutes.
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