New Guy

by Rick Curnutte

Richard A. Curnutte, Jr. is the Editor of The Film Journal. He has studied English and Film at Ohio University and The Ohio State University. He is a founding member of the Central Ohio Film Critics Association and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

The landscape of American independent films of the past decade or so can be, for the most part, defined by cynical, self-indulgent exercises in monotonous melancholy. Beginning at Sundance, the typical American independent (or "dependent", as most "indies" have been co-opted by major studios) can be recognized by its almost undying devotion to self-righteous indignation and angst-filled, quasi-intellectual ideology. It's become increasingly obvious that many up-and-coming filmmakers are content with the point-and-shoot aesthetic of films that are talky but without substance, rather than anything resembling an aspiration of formal cinematic relevance.

Blessed be to Bilge Ebiri and his refreshing surrealist comedy New Guy, finally in New York theaters this fall after a tour of the international festival circuit. The story of a new employee at a Dilbert-esque, sterile mausoleum of an office complex (played with dead-on comic flair by newcomer Kelly Miller), New Guy takes the workplace shenanigans of a film like Mike Judge's Office Space (a much broader film, philosophically) and adds to the mix a carefully balanced level of sophisticated, dreamy comic panache: Bunuel, Tati, Keaton...they're all suggested in the subtext of New Guy.

Ebiri, quite smartly, begins New Guy as a more straightforward situational comedy. Gregg (Miller) is an extremely likable, nice-guy type; awkward, but possessing a charming naiveté. His first day on the job finds him smack in the middle of an odd, disquieted work environment, with ambivalent coworkers, gossipy employees that loiter in the breakroom and a chaotic atmosphere of neglected and/or completely forgotten tasks that suggest a subtle, but deeply unsettling, sense of foreboding, made all the more urgent and distressing by the rumors of Gregg's predecessor's unusual departure.

Gregg becomes increasingly nervous at work and Ebiri ratchets up the Weird, throwing in a toy car that careens around the office, a bothersome janitor and ceaselessly monotonous tasks.

As the work day ends, Ebiri steers away from traditionalist comedy tropes (or, rather, avoids them, as New Guy is anything but traditional) and sends New Guy into darker territory. Gregg finds that his new place of work is not simply the quirky, strange place that it seemed to be during the day...it's much worse.

The surprising, sudden violence that ensues at the film's end, amazingly, does not detract from the film's dynamic overall comic tone. New Guy is fresh, witty and concise in its execution, but also has an extremely organic sense of geographic placement and timing, something missing from so much of contemporary American comedy films.

This remarkable formal acuity suggests a filmmaker completely in control of his aesthetic values. Ebiri (along with DPs Branan Edgens and Chuch Moss) works wonders with his DV camera. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, who seem to merely settle for the tools they have, Ebiri masters his tools. He proves to be a skilled formalist. New Guy is composed of a mix of acute and expertly framed scenarios (a scene where Gregg attempts to coax a cup of coffee from between two cackling coworkers standing in front of the coffee pot is one of the great comic set pieces of recent years), and marks the arrival of a major new filmmaker.