‘The Promotion’: Grocery store comedy offers very mixed tones

Published 2:52 pm Thursday, June 12, 2008

“The Promotion” might be too low-key for its own good, but there’s something to be said for comedy that sneaks up on you. It’s a feud movie, about two competing supermarket employees vying for a new managerial position.

One of the duelists is our narrator, Doug (Seann William Scott), a guy who’d like to please his patient wife (Jenna Fischer) by landing the new job. He’s the heir apparent, until a glad-hander from Quebec, Richard (John C. Reilly), suddenly arrives.

Richard is also an assistant manager with the company, also would like to please his wife (Lili Taylor), and also will stop at nothing to land the position.

Some fairly predictable twists follow: Doug and Richard play cunning little games, but then get to know each other’s stories a little more. Richard is a recovering addict and listens to self-help tapes, so even though Doug desperately wants to get the job, he can’t help feeling for the guy.

That’s what the whole movie is like: it’s almost a rebuke to conventional one-note comedies, which never pause to consider that the official villain or rival might have problems, too. In fact, the tone of this comedy is almost depressive; by the end, you don’t want anybody to win so much as you want them to get therapy and get happy.

This is consistent with the previous screenwriting work of Steve Conrad, who directs his own stuff for the first time here. Conrad’s “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway,” “The Weatherman” and “The Pursuit of Happyness” all had a melancholy view of life.

Mind you, “The Promotion” has sequences that are funny in a very dry way. An entire subplot is built around the fact that Canadian Richard does not understand what “cutting the cheese” implies in U.S. slang, a bit that culminates in a drawn-out, hilarious scene where Reilly (a master at dazed cluelessness) tries to explain the difference.

Scott has a harder time negotiating the movie’s bizarre blend of tones, and the women are criminally underused here. Still, there’s something loose in this film that sticks. It’s probably too small for a theater, but might look like a discovery on DVD.