“I would prefer not to.”

Plot summary: At a public records office an odd new employee named Bartleby (Crispin Glover) perplexes his boss (David Paymer) by refusing to follow his orders.  

Review:

There’s a reason Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is a short story: because the titular character does little other than say, “I would prefer not to” in response to his boss’s orders. Given the limited scope of the story’s central character, it seems foolhardy to make a feature length film out of it. To pad the running time, Parker expands the roles of the peripheral office characters, but because they’re all played as such broad caricatures - Glenne Headly is the office sex kitten; Joe Piscapo the stereotypical EYE-talian; and Maury Chaykin the garrulous eccentric - the film all-too-often plays like a strained, unfunny sitcom. Moreover, its sickly green office color scheme, its surrealistic dream sequences and its use of theremin music merely seem like desperate, self-conscious efforts to make the film seem offbeat and weird. Perhaps if Parker had simply focused on the central relationship between Bartleby and his increasingly frustrated but compassionate boss the film might have worked better. At least it would have been more faithful to the original story, which is, after all, called Bartleby (the Scrivener), not Bartleby and His Loopy Coworkers.

Posted on April 1st, 2008 by Mat Viola
Filed under: Reviews