May 24, 2002 | Perhaps the most impressive thing about Bartleby, Jonathan Parker’s cheeky update of Herman Melville’s classic 1853 novella, is how faithful the movie remains to the spirit, if not the letter, of its source material.
To be sure, the overall tone of this intriguingly peculiar comedy is more reminiscent of Dilbert or Office Space. But that’s altogether apt: Melville is the literary forefather of those and most other satirical accounts of workplace absurdities. Indeed, Parker’s adaptation works best when it remains truest to the author’s original vision of not-so-quietly desperate white-collar wage slaves.
With invaluable assistance from costume designer Morganne Newson and production designer Rosario Provenza, Parker creates a vaguely retro environment where clothing and color schemes suggest the 1970s, but various props and topical allusions indicate a 21st-century setting.
Under different circumstances, such wink-wink stylization can be annoying, if not self-defeating. Here, however, the deliberate fuzziness of period cannily underscores the timelessness of the movie’s (and, of course, the novella’s) observations about the drudgery of dead-end jobs, the politics of interoffice relationships – and, more important, the degrees of panic, rage and stunned incredulity that result when long-standing routines are upset.
Working from a script he co-wrote with Catherine Di Napoli, Parker sticks fairly close to the basics of Melville’s narrative. Early on, he introduces David Paymer as manager of a firm that handles municipal public records for an unidentified metropolis. (Parker shot Bartleby in and around his home base of San Rafael, Calif.) To handle a newly increased workload, The Boss – the character is known only by this title – decides to increase his three-person staff by one. He eagerly considers placing an ad for a dynamic “risk-taker.” But Vivian (Glenne Headly), his sexy but commonsensical secretary, takes a more realistic approach to writing the “Help Wanted” copy.
The brutally honest advertisement for a deadly dull and low-paying menial position attracts only one candidate: Bartleby (Crispin Glover), a soft-spoken, conservatively dressed and almost translucently pale young man with a Brian Jones coiffure and a borderline-somnambulistic manner. His resume lists only one job, as a postal clerk in the dead-letter department, but that’s all he needs to get hired.
At first, Bartleby is an efficient, albeit standoffish, employee. Gradually, however, his eccentricity escalates into a spooky weirdness. For openers, he starts to refuse simple directives by The Boss – not with a surly snarl of defiance, mind you, but with a deferential “I would prefer not to.”
His passive resistance puzzles The Boss, who’s more perplexed than enraged by Bartleby’s strange behavior. But Bartleby’s two fellow clerks – Rocky (Joe Piscopo), a sharp-dressed ladies’ man with a truculent streak, and Ernie (Maury Chaykin), a whiny neurotic whose chronic skittishness appears to be a result of Vietnam War service – are seriously peeved that their co-worker isn’t carrying his fair share of the load.
And it doesn’t help much when The Boss inadvertently discovers that Bartleby is literally making his home in the office after hours.
Eventually, Bartleby stops producing altogether, calmly announcing: “I’ve given up working.” “I see,” The Boss replies. “You realize this will have an adverse effect on your salary?” So he fires Bartleby. Trouble is, he can’t get off that easily. Bartleby simply refuses to vacate the premises, once again remaining polite but resolute: “I would prefer not to go.”
The Boss persists. Maybe, he suggests, the young man should consider a different occupation, like telemarketing or pest control? No dice. To each new bit of vocational counseling, Bartleby replies: “I would prefer not to.”
Here and elsewhere, Paymer treads a fine line between amusing buffoonery and dead-serious befuddlement, between slow-simmering comic rage and profoundly fearful consternation. It’s a tricky piece of work, and it’s much to Paymer’s credit that he carries off the juggling act with such seemingly effortless ease. As Bartleby, Glover underplays effectively, with a minimum of ostentatious quirkiness. The clerk remains more of a literary conceit than a flesh-and-blood character. But Glover is everything the movie needs, and likely very close to what Melville originally had in mind.
The supporting cast is a mixed bag. Chaykin and Piscopo are well cast – the latter, surprisingly so. Credit the filmmakers for slyly enabling Piscopo’s Rocky to channel the misanthropic pugnacity of Turkey, the equivalent character in Melville’s original.
But Headly is too obvious by half in her cartoonish vamping as Vivian, while Dick Martin (as the city mayor) and Carrie Snodgress (as a book publisher) are standouts for all the wrong reasons. It’s worth noting that none of these three characters is based on a figure in Melville’s novella, and that Snodgress’ cameo actually is part of an unnecessary coda that unwisely tries to take the movie one step beyond Melville’s climactic tragedy.
All in all, however, this Bartleby is a much more successful translation than its most famous previous film adaptation, writer-director Anthony Friedman’s similarly updated 1970 British production starring John McEnery as Bartleby and Paul Scofield as his employer. Friedman’s movie failed to find the humor in Melville’s story, and inexplicably ended before Scofield uttered the novella’s famous final lines (“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”). Parker’s version has its own flaws – the eclectic musical score, ranging from the theremin sounds of a ’50s sci-fi B-movie to the tinkling piano of silent-movie accompaniment, is much too intrusive – but manages to incorporate most of the novella’s themes, and even a respectable amount of Melville’s dialogue.
Better still, like Melville, Parker refuses to “explain” the title character. Perhaps he preferred not to?
