The Promotion is generally harmless but boring.
As the directorial debut of Steve Conrad, who penned the screenplays for The Weather Man with Nicolas Cage and The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith, it carried an intrigue factor just on its credits. Conrad has shown he has a gift for taking something obvious and twisting it just enough that it is knocked out of kilter.
In theory, that makes it more interesting.
Too bad that did not happen with The Promotion, except for a few selected scenes of human comedy. Too few, however.
The concept here is modest, to say the least. Set in Chicago, it concerns two men who are competing for the same job as manager of a grocery store chain's new outlet. While the store is being constructed, the two work together as assistant managers in a nearby store in the same chain.
One applicant is an American (Seann William Scott) who is recently married (Jenna Fischer) and concerned about making too little of his life so far. As the anti-Stiffler, Scott's character is a decent fellow, just feeling undervalued. Giddy at the prospect of the promotion, and the raise, he and his wife risk buying a house they cannot afford on his current salary.
The second applicant is a Canadian transplant (played by American actor John C. Reilly). Arriving from a Quebec sister store with a wife (Lili Taylor) and young daughter, Reilly is as desperate as Scott to get the job and provide for his family. Reilly is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict who used to be in a biker gang. But he, too, is presented as a decent fellow, despite past troubles and his annoying habit of littering (very un-Canadian).
Conrad plays out the competition in a low-key manner that gently slides from comic to dramatic.
On either side, however, the feeling is so mild that you neither laugh nor really get caught up emotionally.
As director, Conrad seems reluctant to establish a tone for his opus.
It meanders. That is why I found the whole enterprise boring.
But the movie does have its supporters, who find in it a positive way to look at everyday life. Conrad, unlike many hipster filmmakers who trade on satirical portrayals of people, clearly likes his characters. He is never mean-spirited about them, even when they make stupid mistakes. Nor is he demeaning about their ambitions, despite the lack of glamour in a job as a store manager.
That said, there are some wonky things about this movie.
Taylor is saddled with a bizarre Scottish accent. Gil Bellows, as the head-office boss who is monitoring the race for the new job, seems unsure what tack he should take in his role, so he wavers and it turns out bland.
The Canadian references are at best clueless, at worst stupid, but that is par for the course in American movies.
More troublesome are the American racial tensions that Conrad invokes, especially by establishing a clique of low-life punks who hang around in the grocery store parking lot, where they harass customers.
These youths are African-American. An incident leads to a major racial confrontation in the movie. But the way it is settled, and the way other racial issues are dealt with, is just so weird that it is unsettling and uncomfortable. Conrad does not seem to know what he wants to say about race. So why raise it?
For that matter, he does not seem to know what he wants to say about anything real in The Promotion.
So why watch it?
(This film is rated 14-A)
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