Brainstorm Media
I am honestly not sure how many indie movies I’ve reviewed that were the writer/director debuts of random white guys, but it sure seems like a lot. There are a lot of similarities between them, and often with very similar, tragic themes that are trying to be super deep. Sometimes you get something a bit different, but sometimes you just get something that just clicks.
Working Man comes from writer/director Robert Jury in his first credited anything, and yes, it is about a white guy, but not just a white guy, and not someone who’s an obvious parallel for the writer (or played by the same guy for that matter). The movie stars longtime character actor Peter Gerety as Allery Parkes, a man in his silver years who’s worked for the same factory (it’s implied) his entire adult life.
Like many small towns across the country, everything seems centered around one industry, and although we never find out exactly what it is the factory produces, it ultimately doesn’t really matter. Allery along with everyone else at the factory gets laid off when the plant closes, leaving a town of many without any job prospects at all. For a man of routine and, we learn, a tragic backstory, Allery feels adrift.
Allery is married, and his wife Iola (Talia Shire) is still trying to be that supportive housewife, but she’s reasonably worried as Allery barely says anything about losing his job, and then even more so when the one day comes that Allery simply grabs his lunchbox and says he’s off to work. The movie portrays the man as a quiet type, holding his emotions on his face, so we learn everything just by watching him go about his day.
So Allery insanely breaks back into the shutdown factory and starts working as best as he can, cleaning things up as the plant’s power is shut off. His former coworkers, many of whom are his neighbors, see him doing this bizarre ritual each day and make jokes, increasingly more concerned about it. But it’s clear that although there’s an element of instability there, part of this is simply a man who’s trying to find something to do again, something meaningful in some way.
While factory work may never have been a glamorous vocation, what matters to people like Allery and his ilk are the meaning they get out of supporting loved ones. There is an element of cliché to the quiet man, but the movie handles this well, paying off his taciturn nature well as he begins to form a friendship with fellow laid off coworker Walter (Billy Brown). Walter is loud, engaging, and ambitious — he relates to Allery’s feeling of uselessness even though they don’t share race or age or background.
Some of the little twists later are bit more than might be expected, a tad exaggerated in a way. But otherwise the story feels sincere and honest, showing an arc of someone forced to grow when they never intended to in the first place. I think what’s really interesting here is the humanizing factor of the person you may never think about, the essential worker off in a plant somewhere making things for you.
Losing meaning drives fear and that leads to (as Yoda said) suffering — especially in the real world. It can be difficult to empathize sometimes with people so different from you, but Allery is a character that shows a kind of empathy, growth, and humanity that feels powerful, especially in the current day and age. Overall, it’s an excellent effort for a first movie.
Working Man has a running time of 1 hour 49 minutes and is not rated.
Share this post
