***/****
starring Ann Dowd, Dreama Walker, Pat Healy, Bill Camp
written and directed by Craig Zobel
by Walter Chaw Craig Zobel's Compliance comes with a payload of controversy
trailing from a notorious Sundance screening where various audience members
registered their displeasure in a post-film Q&A–going so far, if reports
are to be trusted, as to sexually harass lead actress Dreama Walker in one of
the more ironic attempts at defending her honour. I've said it before (and
it's only gotten worse), I prefer to watch a movie with a mainstream,
middlebrow audience than with any festival audience under any circumstance.
Sure, they applaud Michael Bay movies, but at least they don't act like their
shit don't stink. Thinking back, there's the example of Sundance's old-lady
reaction to Lucky McKee's The Woman, a movie that, upon closer inspection,
reveals itself as shocking in neither its execution nor its conception–it's
just not that controversial, and its backlash demonstrates the kind of knee-jerk
liberalism that venerates easy stuff like Rabbit-Proof Fence. If you
declare yourself a feminist outraged by a film that is so clearly also feminist, you identify yourself as a fucking moron and an asshole to boot. Sundance
confirms the middlebrow; it celebrates uncomplicated messages
wrapped in indie-glamour. When was the last time Sundance pushed
something like, say, Valhalla Rising, or Synecdoche, New York?
Something difficult, something remarkable, something festivals like it are
supposed to champion? Or is the modus for the festival meaningless garbage that
congratulates its audience for making easy connections like Beasts of the
Southern Wild and anything starring John Hawkes. Fish Tank? Winter's
Bone? So Compliance, which would never be mistaken for something
transcendent and enduring, is actually more interesting than it first appears not only for a couple of the decisions it makes, but also for the degree to which its
audience is pulled into identification with the picture's bland torturers. It's
a Milgram Experiment for the viewer.
Becky (Walker) is a slave-wage cashier at a fast-food chicken chain
subbing for the McDonald's at which the events depicted in Compliance
actually occurred. When her ineffectual manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) gets a call
from a man (Pat Healy) identifying himself as a police officer, Becky finds
herself strip-searched, cavity-searched, and sexually assaulted at the
long-distance instruction of a voice on the phone. I wondered for a moment at
the wisdom of casting someone as adorable as Walker in the role of the girl
who's objectified–if it indeed wouldn't be more effective if she were ugly.
But two things: First, having a sexual fantasy about Walker is obvious and
maybe inevitable; and second, the only thing casting an unattractive girl does
is force me to admit I wanted to see Walker as naked and humiliated as the
sick pervert making the crank call. It casts the viewer in an uncomfortable
position, in other words, and it'll probably make the women in the audience
furious for all the wrong reasons. If the argument is that Becky should've been
ugly so there wasn't so much prurient interest in seeing her raped, well,
that's an entire can of worms right there, isn't it? Or is it outrage that the
filmmakers would force Walker into a compromising position? Would it have been any less outrageous were she not conventionally attractive? Compliance
essentially works–it makes sense within and without context–and the
revelation that the picture is fairly faithful to the facts only adds
to the idea that the reason it's being received the way it is has
everything to do with how credible it all seems, even as we protest in polite
company that it's outrageous and isolated.
Not about employee rights, not about intelligence, Compliance is
at bottom a film about authority. Sandra acts because she thinks her own
manager is complicit; she acts out of respect for the Law, even out of
compassion for Becky, who she thinks she's saving from further persecution at
the hands of strangers. It's like torture porn with less blood. Everyone feels
guilt. Everyone feels the terror of losing their job, lending a lot of
sympathy for the devil when the police come calling at his place of work.
Everyone is motivated by self-interest and manufacturing clouds of equivocation
to forgive that self-interest. Weathering its charge of exploitation, the story
of Compliance is complicated in a really gratifying way by its translation into cinema. As soon as it becomes a film, it becomes
difficult to dismiss it as just the one-off ignorance of someone we condescend
to if we thought of them at all. It becomes an indictment of our weakness and
venality–a tiny exploration into the idea that evil isn't grand and
mysterious, but just a little bit of the natural state to which we tend,
peeking out from behind those layers of civilization.
Agree with your review here, but disagree about festival audiences. I’ve never been to Sundance – and other festivals I have attended certainly have their share of clueless assholes in the auditorium – but this is the case with any sufficiently large population at a screening. You just have a more full house, and a forum afterwards at a festival, which is generally lacking at the multiplex.
So I’m not sure if your mutliplex populism is even accurate here – I’m sure there are plenty of self-righteous jerkwads and your local Landmark, too!
🙂
Did you feel it was plausible though? I agree with a lot of your praise of the film but 2 minutes into that phone call, it was patently obvious that it was a prank. And it should have been equally obvious to each and every character in the film. I don’t know how much of this actually happened – the ‘based on a true story’ claim is flexible at the best of times – but I was taken out of the film at every step by the fact that I couldn’t possibly buy that any of it was happening. Anyone who has watched one episode of a cop show would become suspicious by the time the prank caller asked for a strip search.
All the facts in the film occur almost exactly as they did in real life. Google Louise Ogborn McDonalds Mt. Washington, KY.
Well, all right, but I still don’t think that necessarily excuses the film’s implausibility. Even if a movie is based on real events, it has to appear credible within its own confines. I’ll let a better writer than me explain what I think. This is from the Boston Globe review:
“Something in our neural nature predisposes us to accept whatever we see up on the screen as reality — and that’s even before factoring in synchronized sound and the illusion of motion. A giant, impregnable space station called the Death Star? Sure, why not. A little later, the destruction of that same Death Star by a torpedo-like thing whooshing up a heating duct? Sure, that, too. Some combination of our desire to believe and a filmmaker’s artistry makes the movies work.
That gift comes with a disclaimer, though. Note those words “filmmaker’s artistry.” Just as we happily grant the most fantastical onscreen actions a dramatic actuality so long as the filmmaker makes them seem real, so do we reject anything that violates our experience of human nature and everyday life. Even if we’re watching a docudrama about something we know happened, and it doesn’t feel real? Then forget about it.”
Can we assume that an audience member at least partially agrees to suspend disbelief by walking into the theatre to see a film?
It seems to me that one of the strongest cultural comments of Compliance is revealed when we realize that the two characters who refused to be compliant had the least to lose. Kevin is young, has his life ahead of him and probably minimal responsibilities, except to himself. Harold, if he isn’t homeless, at least has a conventionally unenviable lifestyle. The others have jobs they need and “civilized” ideas of themselves to protect, which may make them more vulnerable to authority.
Do we kowtow to perceived authority in order to minimize the risk of losing what has become important to us? The Compliance characters who become complicit and compliant lose something extremely important (self-respect? strong personal ethics?) perhaps because of their fear of losing what is in fact much less valuable. Sad thing is, some of them (typified by Sandra) may not even realize what they have lost.