Bartleby
dir. Parker Opens Fri Aug 23
Clinton Street Theater
If you’ve ever been lonely, depressed, broke, or just completely screwed (example: “I got my best friend’s girlfriend pregnant,” “I burned down my parents’ beach house,” “I broke my sister’s neck giving her a piledriver,”) you know how it feels to want to give up. These are the times when you contemplate robbing a fast food restaurant and fleeing the country, killing yourself, or buying a pound of heroin.
This is the sentiment captured in Bartleby, based on the bleak Herman Melville story, and one of the works that sent the author into obscurity. Bartleby, played eerily by Crispin Glover, has encountered a hardship that has caused him to give up on life. He takes a no-skill job in a city office, and while he starts out as a quick worker, he slips into days of staring at the air vent. His behavior is tolerated only because his co-workers are equally worthless, and because his boss is both scared to fire him and intrigued by Bartleby’s quiet defiance.
The sets in the film are surreal and hauntingly corporate, with that brown, low budget, city office feel, complete with bland green filing cabinets, drop ceilings, and fluorescent track lighting. Everything is dismal, artificial, and pathetic. Life is pointless and people are trapped in its humorless cycles, some more complacently than others.
Bartleby, however, with his complete stagnation and constant responses to requests with, “I would prefer not to,” causes an awakening in his formerly pacified boss. And when he inadvertantly discovers Bartleby is living in the office, and in fact never leaving, his curiosity and fear of Bartleby surge simultaneously. Expertly played by David Paymer, the boss becomes concerned with not only saving Bartleby, but with alerting humanity to its dismal state having seen how it can strip a person of any emotion, motivation, or curiosity.
Overall, the film moves at a comfortably slow pace, with moments of dark comic hilarity, especially from Bartleby’s co-workers: the ladies’ man Joe Piscopo, the drug casualty Maury Chaykin, and the seductress Glenne Headly. And while it did seem like the plot could have had more density, I think many of the subtleties probably slip by on the first watch. Oh, and if you’re worried about the film being too depressing, don’t be, because after seeing it your life will seem a lot better.