‘How to Get Ahead in Advertising’ By Hal Hinson Washington Post Staff Writer June 02, 1989

Director: Bruce Robinson Cast: Richard E. Grant; Rachel Ward; Jacqueline Tong; Susan Wooldridge Under 17 restricted Compare prices for this movie Find local video stores More movie shopping Save money with NextCard Visa

"How to Get Ahead in Advertising" presents one of the juiciest conceits ever for modern man's roiling inner turmoil. A horror comedy about advertising, consumerism, hamburgers, rain forest depletion and the oxygen crisis and the bomb, the picture doesn't content itself with a reasonable middle ground. It vaults over rationality and tidy manners, over taste and proportion and, for that matter, the rules of dramatic structure. It's nuts, but nuts to an end.

Robinson's mouthpiece here -- as in his first feature, "Withnail and I" -- is the extraordinary Richard E. Grant, who plays a London advertising executive named Bagley. His hair slicked back, Gordon Gekko-style, he's a suave dissembler, seducing the consumer -- "she who fills her grocery cart" -- into plunking over the cash. For Bagley, human beings are lowing sheep to be herded and sheared. All his years in the business have carried Bagley into the inky heart of mercantile cynicism. He knows consumers' every whim and feeble dream, their passion for deodorants and ointments and processed cheese, their deep and heartfelt belief in new and special ingredients. He knows what they want long before they know it.

Added to this, Bagley has a wizard tongue. When he's on, as he is in the film's opening scene, every word leaps out like a venomous toad. The sequence in which Bagley gives a quick master's course in the laws of advertising is a tour de force of glorious, florid, cascading bile. All the while the camera is rotating slowly around the conference table, as Bagley winds himself tighter and tighter, preparing to explode.

As Bagley, Grant is a titanic verbal comedian and an equally audacious physical comedian. Other actors could possibly have pulled off this performance, but Grant's equipment is so perfect for the role that you can't imagine anyone doing it better. For the film to work, every sinew has to be bent to the character; holding back would be death, but precision is needed too, and Grant's performance combines both direction and abandon. He's way out there, but never out of control.

When Bagley's meltdown finally comes, it's over a campaign he's scheduled to deliver for a pimple cream. Every time he thinks of "boils," his mind slips into "a dreadful oily neutral." Sensitive, tough, natural -- nothing he can come up with works. Blocked, he panics and sprouts one of his own -- a vicious one, right on the neck. At first, it's a mere annoyance, but it grows at a frightening pace, doubling and tripling in size, until eventually, as Bagley looks at it in the mirror, it blinks and looks him in the eye.

An id-eruption of the most disgusting variety, the thing not only eyeballs its host but in no time is talking to him as well. Speaking only when Bagley turns his head, the thing drops its conversational bombshells surreptitiously. As a result no one, not his superhumanly understanding wife (played by Rachel Ward), not his shrink, sees "the boil" for what it really is: a harbinger of the coming holocaust.

Robinson's script is spring-loaded with comic intelligence. The language itself is quick and wondrously unexpected; his one-liners emerge straight from the Kafkaesque terror of Bagley's situation ("Oh God, it's grown a mustache!"). For all of this, though, the movie isn't completely satisfying. Just when you want it to take off, it sputters and over-elaborates its premise. Even though it climaxes on a heroic verbal binge, in a sense it ends long before it's over. The conceit itself is a trap, and Robinson hasn't worked his way out of it. What's missing, ultimately, is a sense of danger, an atmosphere of genuine tragedy. Robinson's visual skills may have to evolve to the level of his verbal talents before he can achieve that dimension. He is not a filmmaker yet, at least not a whole one. But not many filmmakers are venturing this far out on a limb. With Robinson, mad inspiration, at least, should be celebrated.

Back to the top