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You Will Be Bothered


Sorry to Bother You is the brainchild of musician and activist Boots Riley, and it’s a daringly unconventional movie that certainly feels like one persons’ bizarre exhibition. Going strictly off the marketing, I expected this film to be a quirky Indie comedy about a black telemarketer who gets ahead by imitating a white voice. What I saw was perhaps the great absurdist satire on capitalism for the twenty-first century.
Cassius “Cash” Green (Lakeith Stanfield) is a down-and-out millennial who manages to get a job with a telemarketing firm in Oakland. Learning that imitating a white voice results in making more sales, he works his way up in the company while his friends, who are grossly underpaid, organize lobbies for a union. In the highest echelons of the corporate world, Cash struggles with the luxuries of his job and his dissolving relationships, while also discovering a conspiracy orchestrated by his biggest client.
Though the world of this movie is a heightened reality of our own, it comments on a lot of real-world economic issues: workplace advancement, big business, wealth inequality, wage disparity, unionization, profit motive, the stock market, just to name a few. A major theme of the film as well is the complacency of the public to serious societal problems; a public portrayed as wilfully ignorant and mass consumers of trash, as evidenced by the popular television of their world. Sorry to Bother You, like Riley, is unabashedly communist in ideology (it’s no coincidence its manipulated anti-hero is called “Cash-is-Green”), relishing the chance to highlight the problems inherent to all of these concepts. But it does so with extremely clever, wry humour and boundless creativity. This movie is consistently original, not just in style and story, but tone and framing; the satire is sometimes brutal and dark. Its antecedent, if anything, strikes me as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, an eighteenth century satirical essay that famously suggested solving poverty in Ireland by selling children as food. Both operate under the same convention of pursuing the logic of a system to a grimly ridiculous extreme to illustrate its fundamental flaws. This is seen to one degree in Sorry to Bother You by the existence of a company which provides free food and board to employees, but doesn’t actually pay them -causing it to be publicly decried as legally condoned slavery. But the movie extends these ideas by way of an unexpected twist, absolutely baffling and darkly comic in nature, yet somehow making sense in the context of this universe, and very pessimistically suggesting the response of a capitalist society.
But as fitting its premise, the movie also addresses race. The firm’s “power caller” elite are willing to bring black people into their fold, but only if they can sound like white guys, because calm, authoritative, put-together white voices sell better. Cash metaphorically becomes more white as he rises the ladder of success, unconsciously using his white voice in everyday conversation. It’s a statement on whiteness, or the illusion of whiteness, representing power in capitalist structures, and being an untrustworthy power at that. The “white voice” is used as a mask to hide nefarious actions of a larger conglomerate. There’s also a scene where Cash is pressured to rap for an audience of privileged white people.
Lakeith Stanfield is really good as the poor protagonist who just wants to get ahead in life, and succumbs to his ambition and comforts. Tessa Thompson is likewise great as his radical artist girlfriend Detroit, who struggles with the moral quandary of continuing to be with him for his new-found security and being disgusted by his work going against her very principles. Steven Yeun and Jermaine Fowler are superb as Cash’s friends who organize the protests, Omari Hardwick plays his mysterious co-worker, Terry Crews his uncle, and Danny Glover is fun as the veteran staffer who teaches Cash the trick of the trade. Armie Hammer is also really great as an eccentric, affluent CEO, a cross between a Silicon Valley upstart and a Donald Trump Jr. parody.
The white voices are hilariously provided by David Cross, Patton Oswalt, Lily James, and Steve Buscemi, and though this is where a lot of humour comes from, rest assured the comedy is biting, smart, and inventive throughout. But what’s also impressive is Riley’s technical creativity; the way he plays with cinematography and sets, like how Cash’s desk intrudes into the homes of his callers. There’s one sequence in particular that stands out, a rather unique montage of Cash’s growing luxury and lifestyle.
Sorry to Bother You is a marvellously weird movie with vicious economic satire only equalled by consistently effective humour, performances, and insane plot developments. It’s definitely one of the most unique films I’ve seen in a long time and solidifies Boots Riley as an incredibly promising talent in his new medium.

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