Anna Daniels
This sounds like a ridiculous fantasy, and it probably is. But it reawakens hope in the neighborhood, and pretty soon the factory is humming again, the neighbors and the local media are paying attention, and management is wondering what the hell is going on down there and whether they should stop it or allow to play out.
“Working Man” is the kind of movie that used to be common but that has largely vanished in the United States, along with the world it portrays. But this is less of a cry of rage or a depressed lament than a borderline fable, focusing on the spirit of people whose skills are no longer needed or appreciated in the new economy. Jury and his crew pay loving attention to the textures of small row houses, grimy machinery, and off-the-rack coats and work shirts and jeans, and the way bluish dawn light and deep orange streetlights etch city streets and tired faces. As shot by Piero Basso and the father-daughter editing team of Richard and Morgan Halsey, the film is a throwback to 1970s working-class character portraits like “Norma Rae” and “Rocky” (which Morgan Halsey edited), as well as an American answer to films by UK-based directors like Mike Leigh (“High Hopes“) and Ken Loach (“Sorry We Missed You“), though softer, and without the corrosive, despairing edge those filmmakers so often bring.
Jury asks a lot of modern audiences who have become accustomed to continual, often spectacular stimuli. This is a movie that you really have to watch in order to get anything out of it. A great deal happens inside of the characters, some of whom are uncommunicative, and most of whom seem to have little access to their own emotional interiors. If you summarized the whole plot you’d have a list of people doing ordinary things, like walking and driving and shopping and chatting on porches and, most of all, eating meals. (This is a great food movie in which all of the characters are associated with foods that their character would absolutely be obsessed with, like Allery with his sad little Braunschweiger sandwiches and Iola with her homemade peach pies.)
“Working Man” is sometimes observant to a fault—it can be a bit repetitious even by the standards of a film in which repetitive rhythms are everything—and once it gets into the respective backstories of Allery, Iola and Walter, you may rightly start to wonder how any of it actually connects to the larger story of the long-gone manufacturing base in the United States and the decommissioning of its former workforce. The score, by David Gonzalez, is just right for the story—a lot of it is built around repeating three- and eight-note melodies that have a sort of “factory rhythm”—but there’s too much of it, and sometimes it intrudes in scenes where it might have been better to let us appreciate the silence in the rooms where characters are going through their struggles.
— 2019 Hollywood Movie Review
