“Sorry to Bother You” is a comedy movie about the desperation of poverty, and how capitalism will either buy your soul or crush it.
Dark and disturbing, graphic and grotesque, “Sorry to Bother You” is not the comedy movie to see if you’re looking for a laugh. But the performances are impressive, the script is provocative and timely, and the visuals are creative and stunning.
The story starts off making simple jokes about how a young African-American man must spend his last $0.40 to drive to his low-end telemarketing job. But the details of the surreal, oppressive near-future world imagined by the filmmakers gradually come into view, which amplify the stakes and tone of the plot. In other words, what you see in the trailer is mostly from the first 30 minutes of the movie.
This movie was recommended to me by several of my friends, and this recommendation was absolutely warranted.
I immediately compared “Sorry to Bother You” to the 2006 movie science-fiction comedy “Idiocracy.” They’re both comedies about a dystopian future overrun by capitalism, and both movies have a character played by Terry Crews!
If you don’t know, “Idiocracy” is a very-low-budget movie (with a cult following) about an average man who visits a future America populated only by idiots and no-one else. While “Idiocracy” has a certain charm I guess, the content of the movie and its political messages treat the audience as though they are idiots hardly more mature or intelligent than the ones invented by the script.[1]That is, sitting around laughing about and making fun of others for acting like idiots is what the movie says constitutes BEING an idiot – how’s that for irony?
“Sorry to Bother You” imagines a similarly-twisted future, except that everyday, and even ignorant, people are given an even-handed and sympathetic treatment. There’s very little an individual can do about society-wide problems, but “Sorry to Bother You” offers something about the hope and heroism of at least trying. This is a story for those of us who care about the world and have to find a way to laugh about the problems (racism, poverty, political corruption, greed) so that we can take a break from crying.
The complexity of the story and the moral challenges faced by the characters are stimulating, and a lot of the content is conveyed in wordless images or background events. Every aspect of the film rewards the attentive viewer.
I definitely have to watch the movie again.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | That is, sitting around laughing about and making fun of others for acting like idiots is what the movie says constitutes BEING an idiot – how’s that for irony? |
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