Problemista

Last night I had another double feature at the Broadway starting with Problemista.  I saw a preview for this last fall and it really piqued my interest but it got delayed so I've been waiting a long time to see it.  It was worth the wait because I loved this imaginative and whimsical take on the American dream.  Alejandro (Julio Torres) is an aspiring toy designer from El Salvador who keeps getting rejected from a development training program at Hasbro.  In the meantime, he works at a cryogenics facility and is tasked with monitoring the frozen body of an artist named Bobby (RZA) but an incident with the power generator gets him fired which puts his work visa in jeopardy.  On his way out he meets Bobby's eccentric wife Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), an art critic who has alienated everyone in the art world with her outrageous and deranged behavior.  She decides to hire Alejandro, after he lies about knowing FileMaker Pro (a hilarious running joke), to help her curate a show of Bobby's paintings.  She promises him that she will sponsor him on his visa application if the show is a success but she is almost impossible to please and seems to create obstacle after obstacle.  However, he ends up being the one person who understands her and she ends up giving him the confidence to go after his dream.  As someone who has had dealings with the immigration system in the U.S., I found the surrealistic portrayal of the bureaucracy involved to be both hilarious and poignant, especially when Alejandro must climb through an endless maze that gets him nowhere as the sands in an hourglass fall faster and faster.  I also loved the personification of Craigslist (Larry Owens) as a genie, who Alejandro uses to find jobs that pay under the table, to be really clever.  Torres gives a subdued performance as Alejandro shuffles through (literally) all of the outlandish situations in which he finds himself and this is highly effective in juxtaposition to Swinton's over the top portrayal of entitlement on steroids.  This is definitely a social satire about inequality but it is one with a highly original vision that mostly succeeds and I couldn't stop laughing!