Visioneers, directed by Jared Drake and written by his brother Brandon Drake, wants to explore the soul-deadening world that is corporate office life. But they make a few fundamental miscalculations, one of which is to set their story in what appears to be the near future, an alternate reality, or both: the Jeffers Corporation has become the largest corporation in the world and probably the one with the weirdest corporate culture as well — employees have mysterious job titles like “tunt” and “goob,” use an obscene gesture to greet each other, and are constantly monitored for any of the early warning signs that they will explode. A lot of Jeffers workers have been exploding lately.There is a small but strong tradition of lightly surreal, vaguely futuristic black comedies set in dystopian workplaces — Modern Times, Brazil, Waydowntown, TV’s Better Off Ted, Joseph Heller’s novel Something Happened, and the opening scenes of Joe vs. the Volcano are the ones that first come to mind — and Visioneers faithfully supplies all the trappings of the genre: the drab, fluorescent-lit sets; the impenetrable corporate jargon; the mood of quiet paranoia stifling the air; the employees who are fired and promoted seemingly at random; the reams of meaningless paperwork; the sense that any of the workers could go insane at any moment; the coy refusal on the part of the writer to explain exactly what it is the company everybody works for actually manufactures.
I like almost all of the titles I’ve mentioned, but I also wonder whether the genre (or at least the futuristic/surreal take on the genre represented by Visioneers) has been overtaken by real life. Nowadays, isn’t everybody’s real-life workplace just as bad as (if not worse than) the one in Visioneers? Why go through all the trouble of inventing a terrible futuristic office fantasy? Ricky Gervais’ The Office and Mike Judge’s Office Space are so wonderfully painful to watch precisely because they avoid exaggeration and instead linger with painstaking accuracy on office life in all its horrible, socially awkward mundanity. In a weird way, Visioneers almost qualifies as escapist — at least the office where Zach Galifianakis works has one of those pneumatic tube contraptions for sending documents around the building. Man, I’d love to have one of those things to play with!
Galifianakis is the film’s hero, a “level 3 tunt” named George Washington Winsterhammerman. Like Jonathan Pryce in Brazil, he’s a passive office drone whose only source of happiness are the daydreams in which he is suddenly brave, decisive, and charismatic — everything he’s not in his real life. Now, Galifianakis is a very soulful actor, a man who even in his most expressionless moments suggests a lifetime’s worth of quiet, unspoken yearning behind his eyes. But numbed-out expressionlessness is really all Galifianakis is permitted to play for most of this film, and it’s awfully hard to develop a rooting interest in someone who can’t even seem to develop a rooting interest in keeping himself from exploding. (Seriously, THX 1138 looks like Vince Vaughn next to this guy.) There are a couple of moments where Galifianakis gets to cut loose — including a funny freakout scene with his wife, Judy Greer, that threatens to turn into a full-scale house-trashing like in Michael Haneke’s The Seventh Continent but goes no farther than Galifianakis frantically throwing a roll of paper towels around the kitchen. But it’s not enough, especially during the film’s literal-minded final act, with the Jeffers Corporation accepting a government contract to develop a mind-controlling device that literally kills people’s dreams.
All that said, there’s enough oddball invention on the edges of Visioneers to make me curious to see what the Drakes do next. They have a sharp eye for casting (who knew Aubrey Morris was still even alive?), and I appreciate their willingness to use comic actors in unconventional ways — Missi Pyle turns up as an upbeat daytime talk show hostess who winds up committing suicide on-air, and even though their gambit with Galifianakis may not have paid off, his performance is anything but an embarrassment. They may still be lowly tunts, but if Visioneers is any indication, I bet it won’t be long before they prove themselves as goobs.
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