The Promotion is such an insightfully hilarious and beautifully bittersweet movie about the American and human spirits that I wish Steven Conrad had always been directing his scripts. Conrad previously wrote The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness, both of which can be felt here as less evolved ancestors; structurally they’re quite the same, while The Promotion shares some of the offbeat tone of Weather Man and a lot of the heart of Happyness. But there’s a story in The Promotion that is far more universal, relatable and familiar, which makes this one much, much funnier and much, much more sympathetic.
And certainly Conrad’s ability to balance the sweet and the salty, as a director, is responsible for most of the film’s success. One scene in particular exemplifies the movie best: John C. Reilly, as the new-to-Chicago “Richard”, sits opposite four supermarket executives, interviewing for a promotion to be a full-on store manager, and he’s just had to defend how his Canadian-ness caused him to miss an employee prank. Conrad keeps a close-up shot on Reilly as the actor fluctuates expressions that communicate, non-verbally, a plea of innocence, then ignorance, then stupidity, then insanity, then doubt, then back to innocence again. The combination of comedy and pathos that comes out of this lengthy close-up and perfectly tuned performance, which is broken up by a couple reversals to the executives and which is permitted more time and attention than most films nowadays allow any single moment, is the most brilliantly thoughtful thing I’ve seen done in this kind of movie in a very long time.
(more…)
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog