“Working sucks, okay? And once you’ve been there long enough, the only thing you’ll care about is how many vacation days you’ve accrued and if your health insurance is gonna pay for the cholesterol medicine that keeps your heart pumping no matter how much shit you’ve worked through it. Then after you’ve gained 20 or 30 pounds because you’re so fucking uptight all the time, you wake and discover you’re totally replaceable. And not only is the new guy better at your job, but he’s got a better car and better jokes and better hair! So make sure you make a lot of money doing it because it all sucks! And that is one lesson I, as your mentor, can teach you.”
Meet Bill; this is Bill’s philosophy. In the great movie tradition of the put-upon and downtrodden, Bill is a miserable middle-aged executive like a dozen miserable middle-aged executives before him. Not only is he aging and resenting every second of it, he’s not even successful in the context of his dreary existence. From his fumbling attempts to start up a doughnut franchise (the irony that he himself isn’t allowed to eat sugar lost on neither him nor us), to his family reminding him at strained dinner parties that he only has his banking job because of his wife, daughter of the great philanthropist, John Jackoby, his life is one crushing failure after another. “It’s a big day for your family, huh?” the local school principle muses. “The John Jackoby Family Chapel? He’s really outdone himself this time. He’s truly a godsend”. Bill shuffles his feet and manages but the most paltry of compliments in return, his utter contempt for the man he’s beholden to only missed because the principle is preoccupied looking for The Kid; hiding, bag of weed in hand, in one of the urinals.
Ferris Beuller without the charming personality - Charlie Bartlett, then - The Kid is here to be mentored by Bill, who naturally resents it by virtue of the fact his family is on the mentoring board. As far as mentors go, Bill is hardly the best equipped to serve as a role model for the young and the idealistic, which perhaps goes some way to explaining why The Kid seems to be the one doing all the mentoring in the relationship. It’s a relationship that follows almost exactly the path you’d expect, with the youngster tasking himself with reinventing sad sack Bill into the kind of upstanding guy a wife wouldn’t cheat on - especially with someone as slimy as On The Scene news guy, Chip Johnson (yes, his name is Chip, and yes that means you can hate him too; think Bruce Almighty’s Evan Baxter). Along the path to redemption and new beginnings is a lengthy and unwelcome detour into his attempts to hook-up with shop assistant Lucy which, whilst amusing enough at first, becomes a distraction that goes nowhere: The Kid isn’t interesting enough for us to root for, and she’s every empty vessel Jessica Alba has ever played. I’m not sure even her mother could conjure up the enthusiasm to actually want to watch her, such is the plodding nature of her work.
If it seems like I’m spending a lot of time comparing characters in this to those found in other films, it’s because Meet Bill is astoundingly unoriginal. Bill himself is a American Beauty’s Lester Burnham meets The Weather Man’s David Spritz; the reinvention arc closely mirrors that of Lester’s, and much of his dialogue could have come straight from Spritz. Yet whilst those films go to great efforts to establish the characters, their depression, and the dead-end lives they’ve found themselves in, Meet Bill largely plays it for laughs, and wisely so; this is well-worn turf, and by keeping the running time short and the focus relatively sharp, writer-director Melisa Wallack avoids this becoming a dull and derivative ‘Identity Crisis’ film, ending up with a witty and light movie that effortlessly entertains even whilst going back to the well.
Much credit has to go to Aaron Eckhart in the lead, who deftly treads the line between evoking sympathy from the audience, but not going so far as to become someone we tire of spending time with. His transformation through the film is realistic and surprisingly well handled, avoiding the now laughing-stock movie cliche of a montage sequence in which our hero transforms seemingly overnight. Bill simply evolves over the 90 minutes, with a shave here, a wax there, a haircut and new suit later on. Characters notice the changes in the understated way they were intended, resisting the urge to have Bill turn up on a doorstep one day as though he were suddenly built to defend Castle Grayskull.
As his cheating spouse, Elizabeth Banks gives another credible performance in a now-flourishing career, giving the role a touch of humanity where others would have simply played her as a shrill, unlikable shrew, out for what she can get. By the end, as the film sidesteps at least one of the obvious concluding routes it could have taken, you’ve grown to - if not like - then at least sympathise with her plight, watching as the man she once loved slumps into mediocrity and grudging acceptance. That her attention turns back to him as his new form takes shape may strike some as opportunistic, but for me it just seemed realistic. He’s a better man for all his mentoring and, yes, his new clothes, and she recognises that just as the audience does.
This isn’t a great movie, it certainly isn’t an original movie, and if you haven’t seen the aforementioned films yet - each of them a classic - then please do so first. But once you’ve had your fill of more worthy titles, do yourself a favour and put this on. It won’t shatter your world view or have you taking a rebellious leak on your boss’ desk tomorrow, but it will entertain you: and if your work sucks as much as it does for Bill here, that seems like a pretty good deal.