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- CINEMA, Page 110Unlanced Boil
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-
- HOW TO GET AHEAD IN ADVERTISING
- Directed and Written by Bruce Robinson
-
- Take that title literally. Under pressure to come up with
- an advertising campaign for a new pimple cream, hard-charging
- Dennis Bagley (Richard E. Grant) develops a nasty little boil
- on his neck. Ah, yes, a psychosomatic symptom, bound to happen
- to anyone with a conscience who is trying to sell patent
- medicine. The viewer settles back comfortably, prepared for some
- nice English silliness about a chap trying to muddle through a
- trying situation.
-
- But, no. When the boil comes to a head, it is a head. It
- has eyes, nose and a foul, funnily flapping mouth -- Bagley's
- id made manifest and shouting down his superego like some
- corporate raider ragging management at a stockholders meeting.
- Goodbye, Ealing Studios. Hello, Kafka. And for a while, pretty
- good Kafka. As he showed in Withnail and I, director Bruce
- Robinson has a truly weird sensibility, and Grant is his kind
- of guy, an actor morosely and ferociously resistant to normalcy
- and good cheer. In a story in which his wife (a spiritless
- Rachel Ward), his boss and medical science tell him all he needs
- to be cured is rest and a more optimistic outlook, Grant's is
- a presence to be treasured.
-
- But Robinson is after more than black humor. He wants us to
- see this tormented body as a metaphor for a tormented body
- politic; the wildly successful British advertising business may
- be to the Thatcherian age what imperialism was to the Victorian.
- But here Robinson sets down his hot satirical lance and slaps
- a soppy poultice of preachment onto the end of his movie. It
- proves to be a 19th century home remedy for an ailment he has
- convinced us may be curable only by more up-to-date and radical
- means.
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