Tuesday, December 31, 2013
"Compliance": a controversial enactment of a phone scam directed at a fast food business
“Compliance” (2011, directed by Craig Zobel) is a dramatic
enactment of a telephone prank carried out against a fast food establishment,
reported to have happened over seventy times.
The film is set in Ohio, but the closest actual incident was
the Bullitt County McDonald’s Case in Mount Washington , Kentucky in 2004.
The manager-owner of a fried chicken franchise receives a
landline call from a man purporting to be a police officer and saying that a
female employee who works there stole money from a customer’s purse. The owner is gradually coerced into detaining
the employee, doing a strip search and getting male employees to
participate. In the film, she doesn’t
find out that this is a prank until her regional manager calls back late.
Ann Dowd plays Sandra, the business owner, and Dreama Walker
plays the accused young female employee.
A rather likeable young male worker Kevin (Philip Ettinger) balks, but
Ann’s own fiancé Van (Bill Camp) brings it to a head, literally (with some
explicit fetishism), before the janitor catches on, leading to the phone call
with the manager and then the real police.
I found myself really irritated by the gullibility of most
of the characters, and by how easily the caller (Pat Healy, not shown until the
middle of the movie) manipulates them. I
found it hard to believe, despite the reports that this is a common occurrence
with low-income workers and owners in more rural locations.
The best parts of the film were the beginning, where we get
a real-life look at what life is like in the fast-food business, for both
management and employees. It’s not fun.
It’s a test of whether you can work at all, with Maoist implications. Barbara Ehrenreich dealt with all this in her
2001 book “Nickel and Dimed” and the material certainly fits into the minimum
wage debate.
At the end, the film goes into docudrama mode, and walks us
through the legal consequences. Sandra’s life is ruined.
There are reports that people walked out of the Sundance
screening and shouted at the QA.
The official site from Magnolia is here.
There are many “reviews” of the movie on YouTube, and the tone
of the film has generated a lot of emotion.
Labels:
indie drama,
Magnolia Pictures,
Sundance,
worker exploitation
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