Extract (2009)

Mike Judge returns to the workplace with the weariness of a man who has already filed the paperwork. Extract views the flavor factory from the boss's chair, where Jason Bateman's Joel Reynolds presides over machinery, lawsuits, and a marriage gone quiet. The ensemble is stocked with recognizable faces doing recognizable work, and the film makes no effort to arrange them into a statement about who deserves to be on screen. They are simply there, employees and spouses and neighbors, which in 2009 was still an acceptable way to cast a comedy.

The film's real preoccupation is commerce and its quiet indignities. Joel's company succeeds, yet the success buys him nothing but more people to disappoint. Judge has an eye for the absurd economics of small business: the settlement meetings, the strike over a rumored buyout, the lawyer who treats litigation as a sport. This is a critique of the corporate grind, delivered without a pamphlet. Mila Kunis's Cindy works her con with genuine cunning, and Kristen Wiig's Suzie is granted a temper and a will of her own. The women move the plot. The plot, however, belongs to Joel.

What Extract declines to do is preach. There are no speeches about the environment, no lessons about identity, no historical corrections, no sermons on how we ought to live. The comedy arrives through a lost testicle, a mislabeled pill, and a gigolo posing as a pool cleaner. Ben Affleck's Dean is a study in terrible advice. Judge trusts the audience to find the sadness inside the jokes without a narrator explaining it. The result is a modest, sour little film about work, marriage, and the impossibility of being a cool boss. It asks nothing of us except attention, which is its own kind of courtesy.