Film

Another week, another Richard Jenkinsstarring movie review (see last week’s Kajillionaire). Who would’ve thought that with movie theaters still struggling to come back and in the absence of new blockbusters, the closest thing we have to a “movie star” would be the empathetic everyman of titles like The Shape of Water, The Visitor, and so many more?

So here we are, with The Last Shift, a fast-food tragicomedy of quotidian struggles, which might otherwise have appeared only on the radar of film festivals and specialty markets, getting a shot at a wider audience. And while it’s very much a universal story of the workingclass poor and the dying of the American Dream, it’s also very much a Michigan story, set in Albion, in fact, and crafted by Michigan filmmaker Andrew Cohn, whose background in documentary film (see his Emmy-winning Medora) offers us nuance in a film that could’ve easily taken a more clichéd route.

It starts with Stanley (Jenkins), a former star athlete who started working a graveyard shift at the local chicken-and-fish joint back in 1971 and then … just never left. But after nearly 40 years of cleaning the grill and dealing with drive-through drunks, he’s about to retire, leaving with a final check from his $13.50 hourly wage and not much else.

His plan: to leave the flophouse he shares with dreg roommates and head to Florida to take care of his ailing mother. But first, he has to train his replacement on one final shift.

Said replacement is Jevon (Shane Paul McGhie), a smart young Black man with a healthy disrespect for authority and knack for finding himself in trouble. He’s also on probation for his latest minor offense — vandalizing a local monument — and employment is part of the stipulations of his release. And with a girlfriend and baby at home, he knows he needs to do something, and the job at Oscar’s Chicken and Fish is, well … better than nothing.

But that’s not how Stanley approaches the job. Stan has pride in his work and takes training Jevon seriously. Stanley has been tricked into caring, tricked into thinking that his work matters. Jevon, on the other hand, sees no nobility in the work; he sees it for what it is — the exploitation of labor. And despite Stanley’s age and experience, Jevon is one to express his opinions, and he’s gonna speak up.

What at first unfolds as a standard workplace comedy diverges to discussions of inequality and race, though Stan balks at the suggestion of white privilege. See, Stan is a guy who thinks he’s not racist. He has a black female supervisor he’s respectful of, and he admires the work ethic of the Hispanic-immigrant prep cook, but hey, when he had the chance during a tragic incident in his past, he failed to stand up for a Black student, and not much has changed for Stan since then. He might be able to offer Jevon insights into people’s condiments choices, but there’s not much else introspection. He even fails to see — in many cringe-worthy moments — that “Stan the Man” whom customers cheer for is not in on the joke, he is the joke.

There really isn’t much to Stanley, and it’s to Jenkins’ credit, consummate actor that he is, that he’s able to bring so much out of this thinly written character. Both he and McGhie bring an inner life to their characters that isn’t necessarily in the script.

What I appreciated most about this film is that Cohn portrays the eventual “bond” between Jevon and Stanley for what it is — superficial at best. Neither person walks away from the shift having learned a Green Book-style lesson about the other. They ultimately remain distant and on very separate paths, even though they’re

THE LAST SHIFT ,

both pawns in a capitalist system that pits them against each other rather than the true source of their oppression.

This is a realistic, and, yes, a bit grim look at the lives of the working poor that doesn’t try to tie things up nicely with a bow. There aren’t dramatic revelations or the realization of longheld regrets. Stan has given 40 years of his life to a restaurant that doesn’t care about him. He did his work and thought that would be enough, and perhaps he still does, because to think otherwise would be too upsetting.

But I don’t want you to think it’s all despairing. The Last Shift does roll along with a certain levity and breeziness, as well as some heartfelt moments. And when it comes to its messaging, it’s subtle and low-key, something I appreciated most about the film. Nevertheless, in this current moment, it doesn’t feel like it goes far enough. Because while I originally saw this film back in January at the Sundance Film Festival, in the midst of COVID-19 and cries of what heroes “essential workers” are, the film just hits differently.

Meg Weichman is a perma-intern at the Traverse City Film Festival and a trained film archivist.

KAJILLIONAIRE

Quirky indie darling and multihyphenate (performance artist/author/ singer/writer/director) Miranda July returns to filmmaking with her first new film in over nine years. Here, the award-winning director of Me and You and Everyone We Know does not stray far from her uniquely offbeat and eccentric brand of storytelling — a style that, for as original, inspired, and brilliant it can be, can also come off as pretentious, unbearable, and twee. Kajillionaire illustrates these disparate notions of July’s work by starting off as a frustrating and even maddening watch requiring a great deal of patience, only to blossom into something that packs an emotional wallop. Kajillionaire is a “dramedy,” but don’t expect any laugh-out-loud roars; you’ll be more mildly amused by the absurdity of the world July’s characters so fully inhabit. The setting is a whimsical Los Angeles, and the characters are a family of con artists (Evan Rachel Wood, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger), which seems too generous of a title, given how little success they have in their field. Working on their latest scheme, they meet a woman named Melanie (Gina Rodriguez, Jane the Virgin), an outsider who upends their world, revealing a hopeful message that (almost) erases any audience discomfort by focusing on the beauty of human connection.

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