Extract

To all appearances, Joel is a successfulentrepreneur whose American dream of developing his own line of food flavorextracts has come true. But at home, Joel (Jason Bateman) is a frustrated man.Once his wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig), dons her sweat pants, usually at 8 p.m.sharp, the door of sexual opportunity slams shut. In fact, they haven’t had sexfor months, partly because of his crushing workload at the extract factory, butalso because of a nerdy, chatterbox neighbor who intercepts him nightly on thedriveway.

Joel’s misbegotten efforts at having an affair, andluring his wife into infidelity, is one avenue taken by Extract, the latest comedy by “Beavis and Butt-Head” creator MikeJudge. The other route is an inversion of Judge’s 1999 comedy Office Space, whose protagonists werethe cubicle drudges of a mismanaged workplace. In Extract, Judge is more or less on management’s side. Joel is theprotagonist, staring down from his office window at a shop floor of dullards,including an imbecile grindcore musician, a narrow-eyed hillbilly and a pair ofgossipy women. They complain about their jobs, screw up, backbite and complainsome more about their jobs. Aside from the stoic Latinos who can’t understand aword around them, the employees of Reynolds Extract are as dim as a room lit bya single 20-watt bulb.

Enter Cindy (Mila Kunis), a manipulative beautywhose “help me, I’m a girl” act fogs the reason of men and enables hersociopathic life as a grifter. As a temp at Reynolds Extract, she plays onJoel’s insecure male vanity like a master musician. Given his wife’s loss ofardor, he’s easily hooked. “How often can I meet a girl that pretty who’s intofood flavoring?” he asks.

Extract isa funny idea, several actually, executed with an almost grim scarcity oflaugh-out-loud humor. Part of the problem is that the only consistently funnyactor is Ben Affleck. In what may be a career high, he plays Joel’s bartenderbuddy, proffering sophistries on the meaning of life, recommending Xanax as acure-all (“I take it for the common head cold”) and offering bad advice at allturns. Most of the other potentially amusing characters are played as thincaricatures.

Some critics have indicted Judge for misogyny, giventhe doubtful characteristics of Extract’sfemales. Misanthropy might be closer to the truth, given the stupidity ofthe movie’s males, for whom the penis wins against the brain and the heart inevery contest. But while the filmmaking is frequently inert, the script alittle patchy and the acting slack, it’s gotten hard to argue with Judge’spoint. Listening to the recent ruckus on talk radio and in blogs about “deathpanels” for the elderly, “socialized medicine” for all and the “indoctrination”of children by Obama, one can only conclude that a substantial percentage ofAmericans are just as dumb as the denizens of Extract.n