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Saturday, June 2, 2012

FOR YOUR SUMMER CONSIDERATION
A Chilling Ode To Pigs & Bacon And Chicks & Witches


At the ChickWich restaurant: "Chick"? Dreama Walker (left) as Becky.  "Witch"? Ann Dowd (right) as Sandra in Craig Zobel's psychodrama "Compliance".  Adam Stone/Magnolia Pictures/Dreama Walker Online

by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        FOLLOW                                            TWEET
Saturday, June 2, 2012

"You are fucked without bacon, I'll tell you that."

The line is a cheeky one spoken early on by a character in Craig Zobel's excellent and harrowing "Compliance", an uncomfortable but endlessly fascinating cinematic experience. 

Based on a true story -- principally the real-life nightmare suffered by McDonald's employee Louise Ogborn at the fast-food restaurant in Mt. Washington, Kentucky in 2004 -- "Compliance", an undeniably challenging film, is an experiment.  Its guinea pigs are the audience and the characters. 

Which of the two will have the "bacon", or substance to end Becky's horror first -- the characters or the audience?

For some in the audience ending the disturbing ordeal of Becky (Dreama Walker) means exiting stage left if you will, from the movie theater.  For some in the movie ending Becky's plight means ending their obeisance to the creepy, convincing voice belonging to accusing Officer Daniels (Pat Healy).

Yet in both cases Becky's horrors do not end.

Both experimenters are saving their own hides, not rescuing Becky's. 

To be fair, the audience has its hands tied.  They are damned if they do and if they don't.  Staying seated means complicity in the strip-search (and far, far worse) of Becky.  Leaving implies not only discomfort with the sight of a vulnerable woman being exposed and humiliated but abandonment and perhaps even cowardice -- the failure to act. 

Cowardice is far too strong a word; short of leaping into the screen and pulling the perpetrators aside or giving them an unholy beat down, there's little the helpless audience can do.  Screaming, cursing and shouting are their only recourse aside from leaving. 

"You are fucked without bacon, I'll tell you that!"

The bacon statement is of course, a metaphor representing an assessment of sustenance already gone from the minds of the ChickWich employees in Ohio, the fictional setting for Mr. Zobel's film. 

As "Compliance" begins we are introduced to several images including a muddy embankment of ice in a parking lot with an abandoned shopping cart upside-down.  The signal: things will soon become topsy-turvy.

Adam Stone's camera gets up close to everything: French fries, boiling cooking oil, bubbling grayish water -- an unholy witches' brew if ever there was one -- then gets very familiar with the ChickWich employees notably its manager Sandra (Ann Dowd), a hard-working boss overstressed on a Friday filled with mishaps at the restaurant.

Mr. Zobel gives an even-handedness to his characters that reflects the deep empathy he has towards them.  Even when things become very rough in "Compliance" the director slowly and steadily creates a sense of alarm, despair and disorientation and most importantly context, without mining for prurience or gratuitousness.  The performances of Ms. Dowd, Ms. Walker and Mr. Healy augment the sincerity of a director who doesn't employ short cuts or cheap, hackneyed cinematic devices to bring about the disturbing atmosphere at ChickWich. 

The fast-food restaurant ChickWich could be a sly tongue-in-cheek name for the film's uneasy Becky-Sandra dynamic: Becky, in sexist parlance, would perhaps be the "chick" -- in this case a young blonde woman.  (Nearly all the "Compliance" reviews I've read use the word "pretty" or "perky blonde" to describe Becky.  And those reviews have been written mainly by men, though some women use the same word to describe Becky.)

Sandra might be the wicked "witch" -- she's a spectacle unto herself with a folksy Midwestern charm that becomes brittle.  Sandra has a new title: ChickWich police officer.  In less than 20 minutes Sandra has been deputized by a phone voice.  The scantiness of this reality -- that a voice with a face unseen by the ChickWichers has compelled them to treat Becky inhumanely is frightening. 

Utterly frightening.

"Compliance" opens in New York City on August 17 and Los Angeles on August 24; expands to additional U.S. cities in the following weeks.

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