EXTRACT

Rating: 4

There is a poetic, if not necessarily gentle, justice to Mike Judge’s paean to the working man and woman, EXTRACT. Not all of them are smart, but they all have an affinity for their chosen field, and a willingness to go all the way to achieve their respective dreams. It’s bedrock American values skewed through a subversive version of morality that gives the more traditional take on morality a run for its money and then some.
Joel Reynolds (Jason Batemen) has already achieved his dream as the film begins, but it isn’t what he expected. He has his own successful business making flavor extracts using a method he came up with in graduate school. The magic of devising new flavor extracts that seemed impossible doesn’t quite balance out the day-to-day grind of managing employees with benign but troublesome quirks, in addition to never quite making it home before 8pm, the time his wife, Susie (Kristin Wiig) puts on her sweatpants and takes sex off the table, as it were, have made Joel dream of selling his factory to a conglomerate and retiring someplace where 8pm never arrives, metaphorically speaking. After a particularly bad few days at work involving a testicular mishap that puts selling the company in jeopardy, and being more annoyed than usual by his boorishly oblivious neighbor (David Koechner doing a wonderful job in what would ordinarily be the Stephen Root role), the one who cheerfully refuses to take either no or goodbye for an answer, has detained him past 8pm, Joel pours out his heart to his bartender pal, Dean (Ben Affleck) about his lack of sex, and his wistful interest in the new temp at the factory, Cindy (Mila Kunis). Alas, Dean’s brain is as fuzzy as his hair, and his specialty is serving up both potent drugs and bad advice. In this case, a horse tranquilizer and a scheme to hire a gigolo, Brad (Dustin Milligan), to seduce Susie so that Joel can sleep with Cindy guilt-free. Further alas, Brad, all blond hair, muscles and puka shell necklace, has a brain that is sorely underdeveloped, making his grasp of his job less than clear. Further, further alas, Cindy is a con artist extraordinaire with designs on Step (Clifton Collins, Jr.), the slow-witted testicular victim, and on committing as much petty theft at the factory as she can manage while biding her time there.
Judge’s direction is as deceptively simple as his script. There is an arch attention to the minutiae of daily life on which his camera zooms. There is an equally astute way with dialogue that is authentically working class while never being condescending, and equally middle-class, without being patronizing, and while always and in both cases, evincing a dry humor that is as sharp as it is deadpan. Bateman, as the decent, reasonable man caught in an unreasonable world and pushed to his limits, roils with a sunny smile on the surface and growing desperation in his soul. His comic timing has never been better. Affleck’s comic sensibilities are carefully unstudied but killer, while Milligan slays with a voice like congealed gravy and a reaction time to match as Brad struggles affably to comprehend what is going on around him. Kunis, as the luscious chameleon of the piece, is devastating, switching gears emotionally as she convincingly pulls a fast ones on everyone around her and possibly the audience as well. Just for fun, Judge throws in Gene Simmons as an opportunistic lawyer with a hair helmet dyed an unnatural black and an expression like a gargoyle as he screams about the legal expediency of slamming testicles in a door.
EXTRACT veers into the political as workers bumble into grasping that they control of the means of production, but he eschews the ideological by avoiding any mention of religion being the opiate of the masses, and by affirming that, as Step puts it, right is right. Not necessarily legal, but what is, in a peculiarly just way, fair in ways that Marx, Engels, or even Samuel Gompers could never have imagined.