Starring Seann William Scott, John C Reilly. Written and directed by Steve Conrad. (14A) 86 min. Opens June 27.
The Promotion is a comedy that’s not particularly funny. That contradiction should scuttle the production, but screenwriter-turned-director Steven Conrad (The Weather Man, The Pursuit of Happyness) shouldn’t be chastised for his infelicity with sitcom rhythms.
In lieu of simply creating walking punchlines, Conrad regards his protagonists — Seann William Scott as a ladder-climbing assistant manager at a Chicago-area grocery store and John C. Reilly as his newly arrived professional rival — with something approaching kindness, even as their mutual desire for a better salary, and thus a better life, has them fixing to stab each other in the back. “We’re all just trying to get some food,” hypothesizes Reilly’s Quebecois pothead-turned-corporate-striver. “Sometimes we bump into each other.”
The Promotion is structured as a series of escalating collisions — the passive-aggressive gamesmanship of desperate wimps — but it’s the bits in between the embarrassment-humour set pieces that work best. A should-be-awful scene where Scott reads a halting letter of apology to a black community group, shortly after macing an abusive junior gangsta in the store’s lot, is sincere and even-handed and perceptive about the grey areas of black/white tension. And it rhymes smartly with the character’s later do-unto-others epiphany upon reading a vintage (and haplessly racist) children’s-magazine article.
The Promotion is visually flat and the tone wanders, but it’s not venal, it’s not judgmental, it doesn’t require its characters to drop several IQ points to facilitate plot twists and it doesn’t cop out at the end. It’s an odd case of a film whose modest worthiness is bound up in the things it lacks.