Miles Teller and a few good jokes can't save a schizophrenic comedy.
| Is the indie star-studded Get a Job a morality tale about the pitfalls awaiting recent college grads, or a ridiculous comedy about what not to do, or is it a romantic comedy about a guy trying to keep his girlfriend happy? Who knows. It never once feels like a quarter-life crisis dramedy even though that’s exactly what it should be. The characters and their situations never feel real, which also explains why it’s just not funny enough for a comedy. | | 2016
Directed by: Dylan Kidd
Screenplay by: Kyle Pennekamp, Scott Turpel
Starring: Miles Teller, Bryan Cranston
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The whole thing just reeks of false self-congratulation for recognizing current economic struggles of those entering the work force without ever creating interesting or empathetic characters on top of that.
The film centers on Will Davis (Miles Teller) who just graduated from university along with his girlfriend Jillian (Anna Kendrick). He’s confident that he has a great job lined up at LA Weekly after interning there during the summers, and his parents seem to be proud of him solely for that job and not because he’s a bright, smart, hard-working kid who just graduated from university.
When Will suddenly finds himself jobless, the film suddenly finds itself without a reasonable lead character. None of Will’s actions or reactions seemed organic even though they all could have been if his character was better developed. He hangs out and does nothing with his friends, but he’s also ambitious and determined to find a new job, despite the fact that he has zero self- or world-awareness (even though I’m pretty sure he did a few months previous). Jillian becomes very preachy about his lack of ambition – but that wasn’t the problem, the problem was his stupidity (didn’t I say he was smart just one paragraph ago? yeah, he was).
Teller had excellent line delivery. Character issues aside, he knows how to make a joke funny, and can make it seem honest and genuine and deserving of an audience. He even got the better of Bryan Cranston, as well as everyone else in the cast. It’s this ability that gets you to keep watching the movie because even though it’s fairly clear that it’s not going anywhere good, there are a few laughs to be found along the way.
Worse than the poor definition of Will’s character was the hypocrisy of Anna Kendrick’s Jillian. She plays the role of a girlfriend, but not a supportive one, just a hypocritical one. There’s no humour in anything she did because it was all based in her arrogance – I think, her character also wasn’t well-defined.
The film had a very quick pace, which in that sense makes it easy to watch, but it spent no time establishing characters or even deciding what it was even about that everything just seemed like a mish-mash of ideas, none of which belonged. I was actually really looking forward to Get a Job, but it just wasn’t based in reality the way it should have been. Way too many ridiculous scenarios, not enough time connecting the audience to the characters and just letting them tell their story.
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