Retrospective: Visioneers (2008)

[Justin M]

Visioneers

review by Justin M
rating: 5/5

I came home from work to my small one-bedroom apartment and cooked a
mid-priced porterhouse steak.  I coupled it with a handful of
Mediterranean salad from a large Tupperware in my fridge, and topped
it off with large glass of water.   I took my meal into my uncluttered
living room and then sat down to watch a movie about people who
spontaneously combust due to their humdrum lives.

Visioneers is a dark indy comedy.  It stars Zach Galifianakis as
George Washington Winsterhammerman, a man who has dreams where he is
namesake and is battling the British.  In reality George is a level
three worker in the Jefferies Corporation, a national conglomerate
that appears to run America.  He sits in a gray office and  with
paperwork that comes from a retro-futuristic pneumatic tube.  He lives
in a mini-mansion with his wife and son, the former of whom
religiously follows a happiness talk-show, and the latter we never
see.  He is supposedly happy.

Galifianakis is fantastic as George.  All of his acting comes from how
fully he inhabits this character, from the expressiveness of his
silent emoting, and he has to be expressive since this is a very quiet
character, and entire scenes pass by without him saying a word.  The
few times he bursts with emotion it's not with the wild recklessness
we've come to expect from actors, but of a man whose still struggling
to free himself.  Galifianakis's job here is even more impressive when
you consider that this is the same actor from The Hangover.

Visioneers takes place in a dystopian world where dreams have almost
entirely disappeared, literally and figuratively.  The Jefferies
Corporation manages people from birth to death, allowing them to live
idle suburban lives filled with nine-to-five jobs and minivans.  The
pervasive banality of the Jefferies Corporation has started to cause a
peculiar problem: people have started to spontaneously combust.  We
eventually learn the reason why: these are people who dream, and they
can't reconcile their dreams with reality. George the dreamer is
worried.

Jared and Brandon Drake are the director and writer, respectively, and
this is their first movie outing.  The movie is well-made, although it
does show it's low price tag at times.  With a larger budget we
could've seen a more coherent world, one in which we see the full
insidious reach of a company capable of producing an office as Brazil-
like as the one George works in.

The writing is top-notch, the story takes us to a place that dystopian
fantasies rarely bring us.  In these kinds of stories the corporation/
government is typical too entrenched to be toppled, it has become
permanent.  In Visioneers, the Jefferies Corporation is truly
threatened by this outbreak of spontaneous combustion.  They react to
the growing number of exploded dissatisfied citizens as if it were a
plague or a war, and their counter-measures grow in urgency and
desperation.  George accidentally harbors a possible revolution,
really a group of bliss-seeking men and women who are as drone-like as
the corporate workers, a plot branch that openly mocks the hippies of
the sixties.  Instead of a hopeless cog, George becomes important.

Visioneers is an excellent movie for anyone who likes their indy
dark.  It marries a high-concept dystopian world with a suburban-
family-in-crisis story.  The movie takes pieces from Brazil, American
Beauty, and More, and comes out greater than the sum of its parts.

Half-way through the movie I opened up my yogurt cup with fruit on the
bottom, and discovered that the fruit was missing from the bottom.
Concerning the poor dreamers in Visioneers, a bare moment before they
explode they have a sudden knowledge of what is about to happen.  I
don't know if that's a boon or a curse.

5/5

(For more reviews, check out http://www.albanyboston.com/, where I
write from Boston.)