I’ll confess, I wasn’t really sure what to think when I first saw filmmaker Boots Riley‘s wildly weird wonderful 2018 black comedy Sorry to Bother You, wondering just what the heck I’d just watched. I mean this movie is all over the place. Mark was in a similar boat when it released, but gave the film high praise, and I think he’s right, but I never really got settled behind the whole thing. Sure, there have been plenty of odd movies, many that are meant to feel tricky in their presentation, say like the films of Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman, or even David Lynch, yet I always sort of walked away from those feeling like, “Hey! I get it. Good for me.”
To be fair, Gondry is clearly homaged by Riley, with a mid-film animation sequence that is credited in the film with a parody name, but I can’t say that Riley quite has a handle on the visual madness like Gondry, despite a few genuinely clever moments. Riley seems intent to throw everything he possibly can at us and sometimes he seems to go too far and other times not far enough. Still, this is hardly a complaint. I would gladly sit through a movie like this by someone trying to do anything creative than 90 more minutes of a movie on autopilot. So that’s what I did.
With a second shot through Sorry to Bother You, knowing where it was going, I grew to appreciate more the excellent work by the always interesting Lakeith Stansfield, who in the film is the colorfully named Cassius “Cash” Green, a cool play on Cash is Green. He’s a down on his luck fellow literally living in his uncle’s (Terry Crews) garage. He’s four months behind on the rent and his live-in girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) wants to see him do better. He gets a job as a telemarketer at a firm called RegalView and quickly learns that if he’s going to succeed, he’s got to unleash something within that he didn’t know he had. He does and boy, does that change things.
Doors open, and it’s not long before he’s offered a promotion upstairs to the join the Power Callers, where the big money is made. This doesn’t go over well with Detroit, who has also joined the RegalView team, along with Cash’s co-worker Squeeze (Steven Yeun), who is looking to unionize the operators. However, what Cash finds on the floors above is not quite the sales job he was expecting and instead becomes part of a bizarre cadre of extremely wealthy members who deal in something more that a little troubling, the sale of humans for a company called WorryFree, led by the powerful Steve Lift (Armie Hammer). And it only gets stranger from there.
There are several terrific moments in this film, including a funny opening with the manager of RegalView (that could be the bases for an entire sitcom) and a standoff between Cash and a guy named Salvador (Jermaine Fowler). Good stuff. And I won’t even get into the horses. Or their, um, swinging nether . . . things. Instead, I want to look a little closer at a scene in a bar fairly early in the film after Cash has got the job and learns two things: that there exists a voice inside him and Power Callers is something he should strive for. Both are game changers.
Sitting at a table in the pub, Cash is surrounded by friends, including Detroit, Salvador, Squeeze and a few others. They are talking casually about pasta, how to cook it and where it comes from, specifically that blacks do it differently from whites, though Cash is having none of it, saying that they don’t get to decide what’s black and white, the first indication that he is not playing the race card in any of this. Salvador pokes the bear a little, making a joke that Cash isn’t really totally black, more like Lionel Ritchie black or Will Smith black. These are men in Salvador’s eyes that embrace their black but do white just well enough to find success on all sides of the race line. Deciding it more important, Detroit nonchalantly reminds them all that spaghetti is actually Chinese.
On that, Cash claims, because they are speaking of white, he wants to make a toast, and gets everyone to their feet. They all grab their drinks and raise a glass, expecting perhaps some usual Cassius-isms on good times and good friends. Certainly seems apropos given the scenario. However, this is not what they get. Instead, with one arm out and eyes locked straight ahead (at us), he offers up a slightly pedantic panegyric about them coming here tonight, including his alluring and talented fiancée and together enjoying a bit of alcohol, closing with a desire to become a Power Caller. This is accompanied by a sudden rise in the soundtrack in the form of an ominous choral piece that looms over his words with a haunting feel of coming doom.
But what’s so troubling about his little speech is not so much the words he says (or the music), but the way he says it, using, for the first we hear, his “white” voice, which is, by design, not quite dubbed right and layered in kind of hollow, something even Salvador makes note of (it’s actually David Cross supplying the white voice). Salvador calls it puppet master voodoo sh*t, and he’s not entirely wrong, I suppose. Either way, it’s shocking to his friends, who stare at him in utter disbelief, like they are witnessing something that doesn’t feel right, maybe even unnatural. I guess I would too.
I really like how this little moment plays out, the comfortableness of the bar and the seemingly light talk on food preparation that slides effortlessly to the toast. I like the way they react, holding their drink in a second of frozen discomfort when it’s over, wondering what the hell just happened, and I really like how Cash sort of shakes it off when the voice leaves him, as if he’s been channeling a spirit to speak for him, something he never does again for the rest of the movie. There’s also this little aside that Detroit does while Squeeze talks off camera, our attention on his words but fixed on her face as she leans to her friend beside her and seems genuinely concerned about this whole thing.
This isn’t a particularly big moment or one that has a lot to do with the plot other than to get Squeeze an opportunity to put some ideas on the table. Yet I rewatched it three times in row, rewinding back and finding something new each time, feeling like this is the moment where the story begins to fully displace from what we would consider reality. And far from reality it will travel, but up to this toast, things have mostly been grounded if not a little hyper-realized, and I like that this is where Riley chooses to hint at some ambiguity, teasing those watching carefully to play around with possible interpretations of what’s presented. Is what follows real? Did the idea of a voice inside him become the spark for an inner fantasy made more authentic in his mind after a bonk on the head by a cola can?
Riley gives his audience plenty of ammunition to set up some defenses on practically any theory, and while a few of mine lose water here and there, and a late introduction of horses throws enormous wrenches in the works, the fun of Sorry to Bother You is its bold, almost unhinged letting go of the rules in keeping you invested. I can’t say I understand it all, yet I know it’s a good time watching.