Bartleby Reviews

It's a testament to both the timelessness and the prescience of Herman Melville's 1853 story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" that it can be so easily updated with so few changes. Instead of 19th-century Wall Street, director Jonathan Parker finds an appropriate setting for this classic tale of alienation in a contemporary suburban office complex. There, in an antiseptic, synthetically cheerful environment perched high above a sea of twisting highways, the Office of City Records churns away with dull efficiency. The unnamed narrator (David Paymer) has been promoted recently to the illustrious post of City Records Manager, and he's eager to make a difference. He decides to beef up his team — which already includes purring office manager Vivian (Glenne Headly) and two clerks, tough-talking Rocky (Joe Piscopo) and temperamental Ernie (Maury Chaykin) — with a new hire. Vivian places a discouragingly honest ad in the help-wanted section (low pay, no benefits, entire office vibrates), and the only respondent is a pale, unsettling young man named Bartleby (Crispin Glover, an inspired bit of casting). With his vacant stare and suspiciously enthusiastic letter of recommendation from his prior place of employment — the dead letter office of the U.S. Post Office — Bartleby is hired to perform the tedious task of verifying the accuracy of public notices. He throws himself into his work, but after a day or two of enthusiastic filing, he begins to show a curious resistance to performing his job. Asked to verify a certain note of petition, Bartleby responds with a politely stated refusal: "I would prefer not to." These five simple words, barely spoken aloud from behind the drab wall of his cubicle, become a constant refrain as Bartleby, preferring not to do much of anything, is soon spending his entire workday gazing absently at a ceiling vent. The office around him, meanwhile, spirals into chaos: Bartleby's co-workers resent his refusal to work and the boss is simply flabbergasted. When he finally attempts to fire Bartleby, Bartleby makes it perfectly clear that he'd prefer not to leave. It's a curious tale, the essential mystery of which has been the subject of countless high-school term papers. Parker should be commended for taking a fresh approach to familiar material, but his determination to remain true to the original text leads him to adopt a somewhat mannered tone (it's hard to utter the words, "Ah, humanity!" in any sort of context these days) that ultimately dulls the human tragedy at the story's core.