When I first saw Craig Zobel’s Compliance at the Maryland Film Festival, I was faced with that urge that often tempts but rarely snares a critic; the desire to walk out. Zobel’s film, about the lengths to which some people can be coerced to defile or hurt others, did not particularly shock me or drive my eyes to the exit. Instead, it was the film’s own persuasive argument that kept whispering in my ear. To what extent does an audience comply with the treatment of poor Becky by continuing to watch it? Did I pass the test by staying, or was my inability to leave really predicated by a social structure I take for granted? Did I let internal authorities (‘critics never walk out!) trump my sense of what was right in the situation?
It’s an ultimate testament to the hypnotic and awful draw of Zobel’s picture that it kept me in my seat, and although I did not enjoy Compliance, it is a film worthy of discussion and thought. It has the potential to cause one to take personal inventory regarding voyeurism, with a fascinating exploration of the point where meek compliance becomes active complicity with evil. It’s a hard film to watch; we are not observing physical violence onscreen but an emotional and spiritual deconstruction, and it gets under the skin in a way a slasher film or a splatter flick never will. When it crosses a line here or there, it’s because that line was crossed in the extremely absurd and unbelievable news story it is based off of. Give Zobel credit too that Compliance questions whether a reliance upon the ‘truth’ is justification for an action’s existence, even if that action is a film. Still, all of this may not mean you want to see it yourself.
Authority demands our obedience; this is the simple and frightening conceit that Zobel explores within the microcosm of the work staff at an Ohio fried chicken joint. Ann Dowd gives a sublime and understated turn as Sandra, the over-the-hill and overweight sad-sack manager of ChikWich, a fast-food restaurant going through a particularly rough day. Overnight someone left the walk-in freezer open and much of the food has gone bad, causing Sandra to scurry and scrabble to still provide what’s needed. It’s an already tense environment—made more so by Sandra’s ill-timed attempts to showboat in front of younger co-workers Becky (Dreanna Walker) and Connie (Nikiya Mathis)—that is tipped over the edge when someone claiming to be a police officer calls the restaurant and identifies Becky as having stolen money from a customer’s purse.
From the moment the caller (a creepy and effective Pat Healy, channeling John C. McGinley) requests Sandra take Becky into the back-room and strip-search her, the film enters a pressure cooker of tension and sickening inaction that it does not leave until moments before its close. Once Sandra, puffed up and encouraged by the hypothetical law officer, starts complying, she doesn’t stop, giving in to each new and frankly insane request the man makes. Adding to the overall queasiness is the fact that Becky, now reduced to cowering in the back in nothing but an apron, remains passive and compliant herself, giving into the officer’s threats that she and her family will be going to jail if she doesn’t play along. Sandra, unsure at first, slips all-too-easily into her role as interrogator while retaining enough self-deluding sympathy for Becky it makes her blind to what’s really happening. Sandra keeps leaving Becky in the charge of her underlings and eventually her fiancé Van (Bill Camp), mostly at the behest of that persuasive voice on the phone. Compliance wisely leaves the final, deplorable act of the actual event off-screen and mercifully unmentioned. It does create such an atmosphere of discomfort in its last half hour that even severely jaded viewers may find themselves dusting off their conscience and averting their eyes to afford Becky the privacy and respect she is consistently denied onscreen.
Zobel has followed up his genial and entertaining debut, The Great World of Sound with a movie that is both ambitious and acutely aware of what it wants to be. He walks a fine line between simply recreating the events of the news story and providing a quirky, idiosyncratic veneer that subverts our expectations. The opening sets up a sitcom friendly atmosphere that invests us in the characters and prepares us for a working-class comedy. Soon, Zobel tears away that veneer and submerges us in what is ostensibly a horror movie about what happens when we give up our own free will upon demand. Dowd is surprisingly human and sympathetic as Sandy, and as the character’s decisions result in escalating trouble for Becky it is this remarkable performance that makes the beleagured manager more complex in our eyes. Walker fearlessly carries the movie, adding layers to Becky as she makes her own series of choices that are no less baffling than Sandy’s. Her innocence and horror are palpable, but that wouldn’t be enough here. She adds small shades of nuance to Becky’s responses that ground her character in a sad, believable verve. She assists Zobel’s goal of familiarizing the audience with an exploited party. It’s easier to imagine her being a sister, a daughter or a close friend and what she goes through is more grueling as a result. Healy is a honey-tongued monster who does much with a role that is no more than a disembodied voice for the first hour or so.
Ultimately, Compliance itself is not exploitative, although it borders on sensationalist at points. Zobel follows the pattern of Hitchcock in the way he lures in the audience, provokes them, and then rebuffs their curiosity. The difference is that he’s not nearly as confident or artistically inclined as Hitch was, and Compliance sticks so closely to its role as moral agitator that it never becomes good art or good entertainment. One of the issues is that the actions onscreen are never fully plausible, despite the fact much of the dialogue and action is pulled from documentation of the actual event. It’s taken me a few months to acknowledge its power, but this is not a film to be trifled with. Despite my regard for the skill and effort expended here, I’ll consider it a success if you’ve read this review and have come to the conclusion that this movie isn’t for you. If you do go, consider yourself warned. Compliance will hold you to the consequences of indulging in its harrowing morality play.
[rating:2.5/5]
Is it weird that this review, although mostly negative in tone, made me want to see it?
does the pig nose girl get nekkid or do she hide behind an apron the entire time?
Wait was that “angry” I don’t want to offend the weak and timid lady men.
No, that was a completely legitimate question. And it was the most proper and relevant response to this review that you could have had. I feel that I did not waste any time at all by reading it. Keep ‘em comin’.
I think from now on my job is going to be to waste ALL your time you feckless child.
I’ve seen this thread running through two other articles. Outside of James question of ‘why so angry?’, which seemed like a legitimate question (particularly for someone who may only know you Xi from recent comments you have made here) and not baiting, I don’t know what he said or did to warrant the name-calling and what not.
Personally, I don’t think we have the kind of antagonistic or mean-spirited environment here that sometimes persists as other sites, and I try to keep it that way. Outside of that ages ago flamewar over Twilight (which was an odd influx of outside wierdos), I don’t think most people on this site are walking around trying to irritate or agitate others. Least of all James, who is one of our newer–but no less important–writers. He’s certainly not weak and timid or a feckless child, and nothing he wrote here would have given that suggestion.
Xi, himself, is more than a grumpy poster and has even written for the site now and again, when it was cinematropolis and for PCN. There’s certainly more to him than ‘angry comments’ and he can be as good a critical writer as anyone.
So, moving on from that..
The answer to your question Xi, is yes she does, but honestly, by the time it happens and in the manner it happens, I wouldn’t be surprised if even those who were holding out for it will feel very good about viewing it. By that point, Zobel has created an atmosphere that almost demands you feel as uncomfortable as she does, and turning away ones eyes wouldn’t be an unbelievable gesture.
James, there’s a lot to admire about the film, but it really does become a picture that is mostly about provocation. The point it effectively makes argues against itself, not for it. I think if Zobel had been willing to mine it for more than the disdain that accompanies the original (and frankly insane) new story, then he might have really had something.
Now, I can admire his efforts and skill, and still wonder if this was the right follow-up for him.
Oh blah to that. Sounds like funny games again.
Are we being all angry today? I’m confused. I don’t feel particularly angry.
Actually, I hate this shit- it’s intentionally provocative, if we’re such scumbags for watching it, what does that make the scumbag who made it?
Jarv, I’m with you. I was rather upset with the film the first time I saw it, but the reailty is it isn’t like Funny Games at all. It’s not particularly scummy and it handles the events its documenting with as tasteful a hand as possible. What I should do is post the unbelievable news story, as I had assumed Zobel made up things to push our buttons, but he’s actually scaled back a bit in his depiction.
I honestly believe that Zobel isn’t JUST trying to provoke us, but it’s a big part of it. I think, unlike Haneke and co who just want to punch us in the face and then point the finger, that he really wants us all–himself included–to think about this.
Where he fails is that provocation alone won’t get us there, and he probably should have developed his story beyond a straight forward, uncomfortably intimate recreation of that event.
He’s not a scumbag and the film isn’t particularly exploitative–there’s no onscreen violence, and most of it amounts to humiliation, but you are right in that it cancels itself out. I do recommend his first film, The Great World of Sound. Hopefully his next feature will leave this sort of provocation on the sidelines.
I read that in your article about it being real. Where did this take place? I’ll look it up myself.
Why bother even filming it if it was real? I don’t get the point. Did he change the story (aside from not showing the violence)?
This is an examination of the “Good German” thing again, and frankly it doesn’t sound like a particularly inspired one. This argument has been kicking about since Nuremberg.
The thought in filming it was to explore, I suppose, the point where seemingly normal people will agree to horrible things if some percieved authority tells them they should. I get that, and this is a more responsible version of that than say Salo or something, but you touch on an issue that I had with the film, and that prevents it both from being worthwhile and me from recommending it.
What is ‘real’ and what becomes real on a movie screen are often two different things. We read that story and honestly, even though it seems to have happened in several different places, I still don’t see those involved as being ‘normal’. We have nothing to tell us that those workers were the flawed but seemingly benevolent people the movie initially presents us with. Zobel makes them reasonable and then asks them to do unreasonable things but he never actually makes the stakes or the circumstances believable to us.
This story and the purpose of his film are an odd fit. By the time someone finally rebuffs the cryptic cop, it’s so on-the-nose that it’s obvious Zobel is interpreting the events through a filter that have rendered the idea of a ‘true’ story moot, even if the details are nearly identical.
The “Good German” debate in a nutshell.
On the rest of that, though, if he’s manipulated the events for dramatic reasons, which is fair enough, it then becomes disingenuous to try to play the “true story” card. He’s basically set up a straw man as an excuse for what looks, and sounds, like another guarded insult for the audience to digest.
Hypocrite twat. Haneke, who’s even worse, at least made the decision to further break us away from reality with Funny Games. There we’re under no delusion that it has anything to do with reality, whereas here he’s appropriated a true story, manipulated it then tried to explore a redundant point.
Definitely pass. This kind of thing annoys me, because it’s intellectually dishonest.
Hinesville GA?
Man, that assistant manager is stupid. Really, really stupid. As is her finacé, although I personally think he’s a bit more suspect.
Good god!
“Stewart was extradited to Kentucky and charged with solicitation of sodomy and impersonating a police officer, and pleaded not guilty.”
Nice one, after the article describes a “sex act” to try to keep it under wraps.
Horrifying.
She sued McDonalds and won. Not surprising. What is surprising is that I’ve genuinely seen someone try to argue that they weren’t liable. Of course they were.
It passes Caparo so they’d be fucked in the UK:
1) Forseeable (yup, 12 calls to various restaurants, and mentioned in memo by McDonalds 5 years before event)
2) Proximity of relationship
3) Fair, just and reasonable. This is the get out to avoid sticking liabilty, but I’d argue that it was entirely fair just and reasonable to assume that McDonalds shouldn’t promote morons to management level, and should make sure that they warn their employees of prank calls like this.
Jarv, he hasn’t manipulated the events, although I guess what I wrote could be taken that way. I guess Im hinting at something a bit more ephemeral than that. He’s presented events exactly as they happened–although I did not believe that until I saw the article–and has left out the particular act mentioned in that snippet you posted above. It’s not that he’s actually excised it, but it isn’t seen or mentioned in the film. I said interpreted, meaning his interpretation of the article is what’s sometimes questionable. SPOILERS Like the fact the maintenance man who eventually makes a stand is costumed to look like a reject from house of a thousand corpses, and when he’s sent in towards the end, we purposefully suspect things are about to get worse for Becky, when it’s really he who finally exposes the guy on the phone.SPOILERS END.
My point is that the little bits he would have to build around the event to make it into a movie requires him to make these people plausible characters. They just seem too reasonable. As you know from real life, sometimes actual people aren’t so plausible and if we portrayed them as dumb, deluded or off-kilter as they really are, the movie would collapse because it would feel completely contrived.We read that article and maybe we picture people like ourselves, but I actually doubt it. I suspect the real players were nothing like those presented in the film. That doesn’t always matter, but when Zobel is trying to make a case that your average joe can be drawn in by this sort of thing, I kind of suspect that’s not representative of the ‘truth’ in this case.
So, what I’m wondering is how stable these people involved seemed before the event, because in the movie they are pretty much everyday reasonable people until the caller shows up. This is my beef with the film, it’s suggesting any reasonable person would fold into submission when confronted with this. If he had embellished a bit more just to show us some of her fellow co-workers trying to exonerate her or contacting ‘real’ authorities or something, then Zobel’s point would come across without toppling the film as it goes.
It’s not intellectually dishonest, just wrong-headed. He’s not added anything more sensational than what’s already there, but the problem is the material itself is sensational. Essentially, he’s tried to do something I don’t think was possible, which is to crystalize a truth by holding up a mirror to a real social incongruency. If anything his attempts to skew towards ‘reality’ have hurt him, because it’s not really possible to capture reality in this case.
Bringing Haneke into the equation doesn’t really work if you have actually seen the movie.