Craig Zobel (2012)

The writer-director Craig Zobel has a gripping subject here but he also has a problem.  This account of the consequences of a prank phone call to an Ohio fast food diner – shocking to the cinema audience; world-shattering to some of those on the receiving end of the call, from a man posing as a police officer – is ‘inspired by true events’.  Yet the dupes’ obedient reactions, which give the film its name, are often incredible.  If Zobel had waited until the end to reveal that all was true he’d likely have lost the audience.  People would have dismissed the events in the office at the back of the diner (‘ChickWich’) as preposterously unlikely.  No closing words on the screen confirming that these events really happened would have rescued the movie.  It’s understandable, therefore, that there are legends at the start of the film to assure the audience that what they’re about to see, although it might seem unbelievable, is true and that ‘nothing is exaggerated’. (The Wikipedia entry for Compliance suggests that it’s based specifically on the ‘Bullitt County McDonald’s case’ of 2004.)  But Craig Zobel goes further in the preamble:  he invokes the notorious Milgram experiments of the early 1960s and, in doing so, he miscalculates.  He makes it immediately clear that what follows is to be a demonstration of what people will do when they think an authority figure is telling them to do it.  Playing the film’s hand in this way limits Compliance both as a drama and in its ability to surprise.  What follows is absorbing and often uncomfortable to watch but, in the light of this introduction, it’s hardly unexpected.

The chief dupe in the story is Sandra (Ann Dowd), the fiftyish manager of the diner.   The voice of ‘Officer Daniels’ tells her that one of her employees, a young woman called Becky (Dreama Walker), has stolen money from the purse of a ChickWich diner.  Officer Daniels, who claims that the diner’s evidence is conclusive and to have conferred with Sandra’s regional manager, instructs Sandra to strip-search Becky.  After some hesitation, Sandra agrees to do so.   She’s told to put Becky’s clothes in a bag on the front passenger seat of Sandra’s car and to leave the car door unlocked.  She does that too.   The voice keeps assuring Sandra that the police will be arriving soon.  When she gets anxious about their non-arrival, he explains that Becky is part of a larger police investigation into possession of marijuana.   After the caller’s face and surroundings have been revealed to the audience, Daniels (Pat Healy) tells Sandra that it would be advisable for a man to take over from her and stay with Becky ‘for security reasons’.  Sandra is more than happy to agree to this so that she can get back to the busy restaurant.  The first choice is a young man called Kevin (Philip Ettinger), although Sandra considers him a reliably unreliable worker.  When Officer Daniels asks Kevin to tell Becky to remove the ChickWich apron covering her nakedness, he refuses.  When the caller barks out, ‘Were you two ever an item?’, Kevin is convinced that he’s talking to a pervert rather than a police officer.

Frustrated by Kevin’s usual insubordination and increasingly anxious to do what Officer Daniels tells her, Sandra phones her fiancé, Van (Bill Camp).  He called her earlier to ask if it was OK for him to go out with some workmates for a drink.  She readily agreed but Sandra is a kind of authority figure to Van and he now aborts his social evening without much protest.   Van proves much more amenable than Kevin to the instructions from Officer Daniels and Becky’s apron comes off.   By this point, her own resistance to the humiliating ordeal she’s being subjected to is fragile.  Threatened that she’ll go to prison if she doesn’t do as she’s told, Becky accedes to the voice’s demands.  Van spanks her; she performs oral sex on him.  Mortified by what he’s done, Van hurriedly leaves the diner.  Sandra then enlists the janitor, an elderly man called Harold (Stephen Payne), to take over.  He immediately objects to the caller’s instructions and tells Sandra what those instructions are.  She can’t disbelieve Harold the way she disbelieved Kevin so, very belatedly, she phones her regional manager to check that he’s in the picture, as Officer Daniels said he was.  The scam is exposed.  Everything that happened in the office has been captured on CCTV.

Craig Zobel doesn’t implicate the viewer in the story to the extent that you feel, ‘Yes, I suppose I’d probably have done what Sandra did in the circumstances’.  The main reason you don’t feel that is because Kevin and Harold manage to say no and because the participation of Sandra’s (female) deputy Marti (Ashlie Atkinson) is persistently uneasy and half-hearted.  You can see how the situation might have been avoided by stronger-minded people.  As a result, when, at the end of the film, Zobel brings up statistics about the number of events of this kind – over 70 similar incidents occurred in 30 US states – you don’t, pace Milgram, think:  that’s because of what human being are like.  You rather think: there are some stupid people around, like Sandra and her short-lived fiancé.   Compliance turns out to be uncomfortable less because of its central theme than because you’re made to feel (a) a bit of a voyeur and (b) superior to characters in it, even though all the actors are good.  Van is especially harshly treated:  he is horny as well as dim.  He’s baffled by the phone instructions but you also feel he can hardly believe his luck being given official instruction to handle a pretty young woman’s naked body.  This sequence has a grim resonance with the early exchange in Compliance when Becky sniggers to Marti about the middle-aged Sandra’s references to her late-blooming sex life with Van.

The striking look of the film and its soundtrack are self-consciously arty.  The close-up shots of fries and burgers and styrofoam cups and the discordant music (by Heather McIntosh) are ominously incongruent with the scale of human frailty on display within the diner.  As for the villain of the piece, he’s never quite as powerful once he’s seen as he was when only heard.  Pat Healy’s face expresses the nasty feelings impelling the caller’s behaviour.  In this respect too, the audience is one up on the ChickWich staff.  When you see him losing control it’s hard to suspend disbelief that his voice never communicates these slips to those he’s talking to in the diner.  It’s an effective touch that the scam both begins and ends as matter of factly as it does:  Sandra picks up the phone to start her first conversation with Officer Daniels and eventually picks up the phone to talk to her boss.  Elsewhere, Zobel contrasts perhaps too crudely Sandra’s frazzled obedience in the back office with her getting back to front-of-house work.  Ann Dowd’s performance as Sandra has been rightly praised, though.  She leavens Sandra’s knee-jerk truckling with a more affecting anxiety to be liked and to show that she’s in charge.   The end of the film is too rushed – the events that follow the discovery of the scam, and which take place over a period of days and weeks, are summarised perfunctorily.  (There’s no indication here that the culprit – a telemarketer and a family man – was charged but eventually found not guilty, which is what happened in the case of the man arrested for the Bullitt County McDonald’s call, and suspected of many others.)  The very last scene of Compliance works, though.  Sandra, now without a job or a fiancé, is interviewed by a smartly aggressive journalist.   Here is another man in charge and Ann Dowd brings out strongly Sandra’s natural reaction to be ingratiating and to do what the journalist says.  Until the voice of her unseen lawyer calls out:  ‘Sandra, we don’t have to answer those kinds of question’.

26 March 2013