If only MoviePass had gone bankrupt two weeks ago, I never would have been tempted to squander two hours of the precious life God gave me on Boots Riley’s lazy pinko agitprop Sorry To Bother You, the single worst film I have ever seen.
To begin, Sorry To Bother You is thoroughly Marxist. But don’t take my word for it: the film’s director Boots Riley, a self-described communist since his teenage years, explicitly describes his work as aiming “to help build a mass movement that can use withholding of labor as a strategy for social change.” The film insists that capitalism actually enslaves, destroying jobs and spreading poverty in the process while impoverishing black Americans in particular.
Unfortunately for Riley, such a thesis demands its audience disbelieve their lying eyes, as economic liberty continues to bring about record-high employment and prosperity while plunging black unemployment, in particular, to record lows. Riley ignores these realities, as one might expect. If the hundred million people killed by communism in the twentieth century and the millions who remain enslaved by communist regimes from Cuba to North Korea fail to disabuse useful idiots like Riley of communism’s appeal, tax cuts and a bull run in the stock market aren’t likely to fare any better.
Ideology degrades art, but what makes Sorry To Bother You particularly tedious is how clumsily it treats ideology. The film’s protagonist is named Cassius Green. Cash is green. Get it? In case you missed such subtlety, Cassius regularly tells us that his friends call him “Cash.” Get it now? Cash! Cash-strapped, Cassius applies for a job at a telemarketing call center, where he soon discovers that the only way to make sales and advance his career is to adopt a “white” voice.
Can you spoil a rotten movie? If you’re worried, stop reading.
An older black co-worker gives Cassius the tip, and Cassius quickly employs it to stunning effect: in virtually no time at all, Cassius is promoted to “power caller,” in which role he must constantly use “white voice.” Riley never even attempts to explain why the older black coworker who taught Cassius about “white voice” has never been promoted, nor does he explain why Cassius’s white co-workers are not promoted. Logic, schmogic—stick to the script, as his wooden characters might say.
Once promoted, Cassius learns the telemarketing company’s awful secret: “power callers” sell slave labor for the all-inclusive lifestyle colony WorryFree, whose white CEO demands Cassius warble a profane free-style rap for him and his white, fat-cat buddies, as if to suggest that the demand for degrading hip-hop music comes primarily from wealthy, white, middle-aged businessmen. Here again viewers must get past Riley’s Orwellian insistence that freedom is slavery and ignore the historical lessons of every communist slave regime since the Soviet Union, if only to appreciate the film’s clumsiest use of metaphor: WorryFree uses a secret drug to turn its workers literally into horses. Get it? They’re workhorses! Get it?
The film only goes downhill from there, descending finally into a proletarian rant which perhaps George Bernard Shaw could have pulled off but which Boots Riley does not. The acting is fine, oscillating between “rubber stamp” representation and adequacy. The writing is lazy; the message, perverse. In Riley’s wayward vision, freedom is mistaken for slavery, grievance for holiness, production for destruction, growth for decay. Is it any wonder Hollywood critics lavish the film with rave reviews, while audiences give it a failing grade?