The Boss Of It All

Having withstood massive criticism over his as yet unfinished America Trilogy – the first two installments of which, Dogville and Manderlay, were grueling, galvanizing cinema experiments that I happened to have loved – controversial genius Lars von Trier makes his return with this entertaining, wholly unexpected piece of formula comedy. The Boss of It All presumes a love of genre convention on the part of the audience and features von Trier in voice over segments skewering the contents of his own feature and teasing its viewers for their appreciation of what his artistic mind perceives as trite. At least that’s what he claims, but there’s reason to believe his motivations for the movie run deeper than mockery. At a loss for what exactly artistry means in the contemporary world, he seems to be pressing himself for answers to the unknown. If a complex slavery tome like Manderlay gets dismissed then how exactly can a director get his message across successfully? Perhaps it’s by claiming that there is no message at all. He insists that there will be “no preaching” in The Boss of It All and that all that is in store for us is “just a cozy time,” but whether he knows it or not (and I suspect he does) what he has actually made is a really brilliant, somewhat slight, but totally hilarious workplace comedy that both satirizes the genre and concedes a bit that it does have certain powers of persuasion.

Of course, even when actively attempting to make his material seem banal, von Trier crafts a premise far too clever to ever be a part of the sort of mundane mainstream comedies that he’s trying to emulate. In what plays as both a critique of corporate accountability (or lack thereof) and a send up of the self-important modern artistic process (of which von Trier seems willing to admit he is a part of) the film focuses on an out of work but deeply self-serious actor named Kristoffer (Jens Albinus) who gets hired for the unlikely gig of playing the “boss of it all” at an IT company whose real boss, Ravn, (Peter Ganzler) is too much of a sap to take the blame for his shrewd business decisions. For years, employees have gone without seeing the fictitious man in charge, allowing Ravn to simply write of all his firings and insensitive proposals by simply saying “the boss of it all said so.” In true screwball fashion, his scheme goes awry when a potential client demands to deal directly with the boss of the company and Kristoffer is forced to stick around at the office while Ravn waits for the deal to come to fruition. Gags about Kristoffer’s lack of company knowledge and confusion over his character’s identity carry the film’s lightweight premise along from there with von Trier interjecting equally funny sidebar commentary about just how silly and unoriginal everything within the film really is. Its delivery system of what he calls “living room realism” might not satisfy his preference for the theatrical, but it’s truly doubtful that he’s not quietly celebrating the heavy doses of skeptical whimsy this movie tosses out at the crowd, critiquing the corporate system and placing very little confidence in any one character. Neither business nor the arts comes off as a viable, honest institution here. The film registers as a fairly good time on the surface, but it really is as bleak as von Trier’s other work albeit with a softer plot and more indirect implications.

In the end, von Trier chides his audience by saying that anyone who got what they wanted out of what he calls a forgettable, clichéd feature got “what they deserved.” Whether or not he really thinks fans of this film are simply fools or whether he’s mocking his own cynical artistic outlook is unclear to me. He’s certainly not the type to be coy about openly hating his own audience. Either way, count me among the satisfied customers.

Grade: A-