'Problemista' is a Glorious Little Movie About the Petty Indignities of Consumerism

Julio Torres's impressive debut stars Tilda Swinton in the performance of her career, as a superpredator forged in the fires of modern capitalism.

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A24

There’s a lot to say about Problemista, Julio Torres’ brilliant directorial debut, but it feels wrong to lead with anything but Tilda Swinton, who gives the performance of a career as a sort of monolithic uber-Karen forged in the fires of modern capitalism. At least, it’d be the performance of anyone else’s career. For Tilda Swinton it’s almost normal. Years ago during an interview, I asked Jack Black if there was anyone who could make him feel star struck. He answered Tilda Swinton, which was both unexpected and self-evidently corrent. Tilda Swinton is the actor’s actor. In Problemista, Julio Torres lets her cook.

Swinton manages to stand out even while Problemista isn’t exactly her show. It’s the directorial debut of former SNL writer Torres, who also writes and stars, in a classic comedian’s breakout vehicle. And what a vehicle it is, combining Seinfeldian observational comedy with a Charlie Kaufman-esque grasp of the fantastic for a sci-fi tinged humanistic triumph that brutally skewers both capitalism and the immigrant experience in a way that feels somehow hopeful.

If Problemista (now available to stream, for a fee) feels a little precious at first, a little early aughts twee, give it a chance. Torres brings it full circle by the end, achieving arguably the toughest task for any novice filmmaker: he sticks the landing. (“Wow them in the end, and you’ve got yourself a hit,” echoes Brian Cox as screenwriting guru Robert McKee in Adaptation).

The capsule description of Problemista would go something like, an absurdist Devil Wears Prada with an immigrant protagonist and sci-fi elements. Torres, a dreamy-eyed little guy with a sideways hair horn like Alfalfa from Little Rascals (a strand he twists into a knot when lost in his reveries) plays Alejandro, a Salvadoran immigrant living in New York who dreams of one day designing toys for Hasbro. “Toys these days are wonderful,” he says in his video application. “But they’re a little too preoccupied with, um, fun. Life can’t all be parties.”

The overgrown slacker chasing his dream of a creative career has been a staple of comedian star vehicles since time immemorial (satirized brilliantly by Tom Green as Gord the would-be animator in Freddy Got Fingered). The beauty of Problemista is that it’s not a story about Alejandro “learning to grow up,” or finding the confidence to realize his dream, as we usually see it. It’s more about the Rube-Goldbergian existence his immigrant status has forced him into, a story about trying to navigate indifferent bureaucracy and weather the petty indignities of capitalism told with a comedian’s wit and a visual artist’s stylistic panache.

What Alejandro really wants is to join Hasbro’s young toy designer incubator program. Trouble is, their online application only lists residents of US territories in its drop-down menu. He’s in the US on a work-visa, meaning he can only stay if he has a job, which he does only tenuously at the only place that would hire him: a cryogenic facility that sells rich people the promise of living forever by drinking a special liquid that will freeze their organs and keep them in frozen slumber until some indeterminate point in the future when scientists might figure out a way to revive them. And their bodies will only stay frozen so long as their estate keeps paying the monthly bill to keep them so, like Netflix for your corporeal existence.

When Alejandro gets fired for a daydream-related mishap, he latches onto what looks like his only liferaft: a potential job working for the cryo facility’s most difficult client, Elizabeth (Swinton), the shrill, borderline psychotic widow of a cryogenically frozen artist played by the RZA from Wu Tang Clan. He and Elizabeth fell in love when she, a prickly art critic, was the only one who understood his life’s work, paintings of eggs. He developed a terminal illness and she’s trying to carry on his dream of keeping him frozen and promoting his work in the hopes that he can one day be revived into a world that finally “gets” him.

Essentially working for Elizabeth on spec, Alejandro tries to manage the impossible — keeping her happy enough that she’ll eventually sponsor his Visa application, while simultaneously trying to actually earn enough money to live by doing gig work on Craigslist — the website personified by a capricious wizard played by Larry Owens in a series of stylized fantasies. He lives, meanwhile, in a dystopic apartment share with an uber entitled artist named “Spray,” played by Torres’ actual college roommate, comedian Spike Einbinder. Torres’s magical realist takes on obnoxious New York hipsterati are some of my favorite scenes, playing like a glorious combination of Girls and Being John Malkovich. (Think: the girl Hannah meets at a Brooklyn cocktail party who tells her “My name is Tako, with a K. It sounds like you’re pronouncing it with a C.”)

The embittered, demanding critic is as much a stock character as the slacker man-child with a dream, but Elizabeth is much more than that, transcending even her basic status as the ultimate gay man’s fantasy of an imperious woman. As Alejandro struggles to stay afloat in an uncaring world, suffering the indignities of gig work, the legal system, and overdraft fees, Elizabeth is the ultimate shark, a capitalism superpredator.

When everyone is primarily a consumer, a number on a spreadsheet to bureaucrats somewhere and an annoyance to their distracted underlings, our value is ultimately in how well we can complain to the manager. This is something that Elizabeth does almost reflexively, all the time. In Elizabeth’s hands, threatening to get waiters fired if they bring the wrong salad is a kind of superpower. Even as everyone fears, hates, and even flees at the sight of her, she can literally make subway trains run the opposite direction through sheer bitchiness. And considering Alejandro is a shy immigrant trying not to die, learning from Elizabeth turns out to be the key to saving his life, and not just because she has the power to approve his Visa application.

There are a lot of movies that elevate work-a-day trevails into magical realist fantasy, but Torres combines his razor sharp takes on immigrant life, consumer culture, entitled artists, and gay New York into something approaching a humanistic unified vision. He offers not just a critique of our disconnected existence, but a story that offers genuine connection, in one of the best filmmaking debuts I’ve seen since Sorry To Bother You. Torres’s uncompromised vision is a textbook example of finding the universal through the specific.