Kabluey, which was recently released o DVD after a brief run in theaters, is supposed to be a comedy, which given the state that its characters are in makes a statement right there. Almost ten years ago, Office Space captured an economic landscape where people had to rely on a soldierly camaraderie to keep from going insane at their shit jobs. In Kabluey, there's no camaraderie: an invisible bubble seems to have been lowered around each individual character, cutting off their ability to reach out or even empathize with their fellow sufferers, and it's everyone for himself. The movie starts with Leslie (Lisa Kudrow), who is as good as marooned in her cluttered Texas home, trying to watch over her two small sons while her husband is off in Iraq, getting his tour of duty endlessly extended. If Leslie doesn't go back to work, she's about toe get her health benefits cut off, but she can't afford day care, so she reluctantly calls in her husband's brother, Salman, a doofus and loser who is played by the movie's writer-director, Scott Prendergast. He, in turn, answers a job offer and finds himself reporting to a hollowed-out building--construction was completed just before the Internet company that paid for it hit the skids--where a harried woman (Conchata Ferrell) explains that he's part of a modest boondoggle, being used to burn off cash set aside to attract attention to the doomed company. In quick order, she stuffs him into a blue , top-heavy, foam-rubber costume that makes him look like a penis at half-mast and deposits him on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere, with a pile of flyers announcing the availability of office space tucked under his arm. She's almost out of sight before it occurs to her to stop the car and yell, "You need a ride back?"
This is Scott Prendergast's first film, aside from some shorts and a small acting role in the instant-punchline Paris Hilton vehicle The Hottie and the Nottie, which probably taught him a great deal about the demoralizing nature of taking money for thankless work perforned in the course of an ill-conceived venture. He's not exactly a natural, either as a director or a leading actor. As a director, he tends to push too hard, going for broadly zany visual effects; as an actor, he leaps at the chance to give himself an opening scene here that may give viewers the mistaken idea that his character is meant to be some sort of medium-end functioning autistic, though it develops that he's just supposed to be "quirky" and a little withdrawn. But Prendergast has caught onto two of the best-kept secrets in movies: one, that you can forgive a movie a lot if it's constructed around the right central image, and two, that it's hard to go wrong with a big, stupid-looking costume. The recurring image of the poor shmuck encased in that sweltering suit, alone on a deserted highway, his foam-rubber head hanging in the Texas sun, does for Kabluey what George Stevens seemed to think a shot of the family house framed in the center of the wide screen would do for Giant.) The movie has other attractions, such as Christine Taylor as a well-heeled mother who hires the corporate logo to entertain at a kid's birthday party, and Teri Garr as a woman who lost her money in the company and is last seen gingerly poking the (abandoned) costume with a stick. And Lisa Kudrow is terrific, as is her wont: her ability to suggest a mind that's whirling at top speed trying to think her way out of a set of circumstances so crushing that it would lay a less resilient person down for the count could make her the movies' face of a new depression. Maybe it's time for somebody to launch an all-girl remake of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.