Rating of
4/4
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Company Line!
Filmhaus - wrote on 04/17/21
Long ago when I worked as a 3rd party contractor under a certain unnamed telecommunications company, they gave us 'the talk' during our first day of orientation.
It had to do with unions. The company's stance was steadfastly in the camp of risk mitigation.
They went on and on about our freedom to choose, while gently inferring we were also free to be shown the door, living in an 'at will' state.
Luckily, I was young, low on the corporate ladder, and dumb enough to express myself freely so that no one dared invite me to union meetings.
Or to leadership meetings after it was noticed I was playing buzzword bingo on a napkin.
The blessing and the curse of being naive to politics is that you never truly fit in anywhere.
That being said, "I'm All Right, Jack" is a comedy of errors with a protagonist that embodies this state and expounds upon the pratfalls therein with explosive incisiveness.
Thematically, the movies extols the virtues of living naked in a complex world, to the point where it literally starts the first scene in a nudist camp.
Our innocent hero, Windrush, is a recent college graduate and heir to his aunt's vast estate. Instead of taking the easy life of a gentleman of means, he wants to make something of himself and climb the ladder (not so easy in a nudist camp).
Looking to further his ambition, he leaves his naturalist father behind (har!), and attempts to enter the complicated world of fast-track leadership, quickly demonstrating his inability to 'hold his own' in a pants-wettingly funny sequence in a candy-bar factory.
Unhampered by failure, he is persuaded by his uncle to start at the bottom in a 'working-class' position at his missile factory, unaware that his manners, work ethic, and education are being used by the owners, the factory management, efficiency auditors, the press, and the unions, as each tries to jockey themselves into a position of political advantage.
To explain any more of the plot would spoil the experience. Needless to say, the film is very, very clever (it won a British Academy Award for the screenplay) and ends on a perfect note.
In addition, given its subject matter, I'm happy to say that while this film has a cynical undercurrent, it plays fair by never indicting one side over the other, and maintains a fairly breezy tone, unlike Billy Wilder's Front Page or Ace in the Hole.
This is due primarily to the decision of the director to cast Ian Carmichael in the main role as Windrush.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, we truly feel sorry for him as he wanders naively into trouble while being continually taken advantage of in a world that he is better off not quite understanding.
But it doesn't keep us from laughing with him, and needless to say, I laughed myself silly.
(As an aside, Peter Sellers & Terry Thomas, both in supporting roles, were never funnier. In fact, Seller's only British Academy Award was for his role in this film.)
