Every year, without fail, a film comes along that the world falls in love with that leaves me scratching my head, enraged and discouraged. When Lynne Ramsey's You Were Never Really Here arrived at the beginning of the year I breathed a heavy sigh, but also one filled with relief - "well, that's that spot filled for the year!", in a way glad that I'd gotten it out of the way early. Little did I know that Boots Riley's directorial debut, Sorry To Bother You, was being cooked up. After winning over US audiences and critics in the summer, a storm of acclaim and hype was summoned as it awaited foreign distribution. I honestly wish they hadn't bothered.
In Oakland, California, Cassius "Cash" Green - because the allegories are heavy in this one, folks! - is an African-American man working as a low-level telemarket, eager to make a better life for himself and girlfriend, Detroit. When he learns to adopt a white accent to thrive in the job, he quickly rises within the company's ranks, forced to choose between money and his consciousness as RegalViews's dodgy dealings are uncovered and he becomes more involved. It stars Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson as Cassius and Detroit, with supporting turns from Steven Yeun, Terry Crews, Jermaine Fowler and Armie Hammer.
Sorry To Bother You is, without exception, the messiest screenplay to be chucked on to our screen in quite some time. Riley's Sorry script has been kicking around since 2012 and in those six years, as the world around him has changed, ideas have been thrown into the mix and left to pile on top of each other. Resulting in a shamble of half-baked ideas and unfiling concepts, nothing in this film meshes together to form anything resembling cohesion, an entirely disjointed and overbearing clutter of disparate narrative threads hanging carelessly. Riley starts so many sentences but finishes very few, deeply exasperating in his incoherence and more infuriating as the minutes pass by. If there's one thing to praise, it's the ambition to tackle so much in a debut outing - but there's where my respect ceases.
As early as the first twenty minutes, Sorry To Bother You begins to lose the refreshing humour, scathing socio-political focus and infectious quirkiness in search of something bigger than itself. As the more overt and absurd elements creep in, signalling the 'make or break' point of the film - where you're either fully on board, invested in the bizarre concoction, or, like me, utterly repelled by it - it's hard for a film to ever redeem your support as an audience member as it obliterates boundaries so recklessly, leaving a trail of total destruction in its path. It is an impediment that Riley's directing his own material because Sorry To Bother You would have truly benefited from a third-party to tidy the mayhem. His work behind the camera lens is as irregular as his screenplay and his inexperience shows.
Even down to the horrendously-calibrated 'white voices', this whole thing feels haphazardly constructed; like lacklustre CGI in a contrarily great blockbuster or a minor plot hole in a terrific story, this isn't something that would matter if the whole felt more complete - but with so much to dislike, it fortified my frustrations beyond comprehension. It all reeks so strongly of desperation for an artistic voice to be heard; except, there's so much being shouted that it's unintelligible.
There's some undoubtedly great talent in the mix here, actors who have earned my respect through various other projects; here, they save face, if little else. Stanfield commits to the role, at least attempting to ground the chaos with a looser performance that is otherwise swallowed up by everything that surrounds him. Thompson is as solid as can be expected with a character as weakly sketched as Detroit. 'Radical feminist' does not define a character; sure, it can absolutely shape them into the person we see but Riley spends little time developing her outside of the relationship with Cassius that she simply becomes an emblematic reaction to the decisions he makes within the narrative. Rather than a character in her own right, she's a method to counteract the moral conundrum of the minute, lacking drive and agency beyond that intrinsically linked to developing Cassius. Armie Hammer is a scene-stealer and briefly enlivens a third act that lost me more and more as the madness heightens.
Less is very often more and while it is admirable that Riley seeks to throw his punches with his debut outing as writer-director, my compliments halt rather immediately after that. With Sorry To Bother You, he has attempted to build a complex house of cards on quicksand; the more he throws on the pile, the more it swallows him and the entire film up, resulting in a sloppily scattershot effort that suffers from the director's obvious inability to restrain himself and his frenzied ideas. He never once attempts to hold himself back, and that's why it all falls apart so rapidlly. What a crushing mess Sorry To Bother You is, a farce of tacky tricks that enrages as it loses control and focus.
★★★✬☆☆☆☆☆☆
(3.5/10)
Summary: Sorry To Bother You is an enraging experience, a terribly unrefined jumble of ambitious ideas that are forcefully clobbered together by an inexperienced writer-director desperate to leave his mark. With this, the messiest film of the year (and probably the worst screenplay I've sat through), I'm sorry I bothered.