The Promotion
Of the five new movies I saw this week (War, Inc., The Happening, The Promotion, Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, and Mongol), I can say without reservation that The Promotion was by far and away the most delightful surprise.* I believe it’s in limited release right now, but if you happen to live near a theater screening it, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s the best of the recent string of blue collar comedies** (like the surprisingly touching Waiting and the unsurprisingly terrible Employee of the Month); if I was pitching the movie to Ben Fong-Torres, I’d say “it’s a think piece about a pair of mid-level supermarket employees struggling with their own limitations in the face of the American dream.”
Starring Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly as assistant managers competing to run the new grocery store opening up down the street from their current place of business, The Promotion manages to portray the struggles of real, middle class folks without condescension or snobbery. These feel like real people striving to achieve a basic quality of life for themselves and their loved ones–though the lengths the two will go to in order to achieve that life seem kind of silly at first, the more we learn about the two men the more sympathetic we become.
The sense of reality is helped by the director’s refusal to shy away from possible controversy. As he said in an interview with Ain’t It Cool News,
Well, a weakness that might come from pulling punches would be…the analogy that I’ve been sharing is that, like, the Charles Bronson movie, remember, where there’s, like, a street gang and there’s six African-Americans and one white guy, and you know that the white guy’s in there because the studio told them to put a white guy in there. You just don’t see it in the world, right? I mean, there are white gangs, and there are African-American gangs, but there aren’t many gangs that are integrated. I just haven’t encountered them.
In fact, I’ve noticed, I have stuff ordered to me, I’ve noticed that some of our content [in THE PROMOTION] that concerns African-Americans, Latinos, some people are made a little uncomfortable by it. And, I don’t know what to say about that except that no one gets off under my consideration. I am as hard on depicting the white board members as being narrow-minded and insufficient as I am in depicting this gang of 19-year-olds as being unsavory and unpleasant in the way their day-to-day language makes the customers feel, which is…It’s all I’m doing. And, if I didn’t bump into it in life, I wouldn’t write about it.
The Promotion won’t enter the pantheon of great comedies, but it’s very entertaining and has a good heart. You should definitely check it out if you have the time.
*Mongol was the least pleasant surprise. I’ll have more on that next week, probably.
**Not to be confused with the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.