Sure, and babies rain down from heaven. It almost goes without saying that Tommy's employer and mentor, Heinrich Grigoris (Stanley Tucci), wears a shady little mustache, has his line of patter polished to a high gloss and keeps his ulterior motives under deep cover. Shopping for ironies in the age of urban paranoia? How about a con man who foists "security systems" off on the very people he plans to burglarize? Why, it's downright...ambiguous.
As for Heinrich's mousy assistant, Sally (Mary McCormack), of the pop-bottle glasses and the shy manner, she's very much in on the scam. Poor Tommy, of course, is not--at least not until Dr. Pangloss, as always, takes Candide into his confidence about the ways of the world.
Aside from some solemn preachments about the hazards of contemporary life, this nicely made independent feature can be a screamingly funny piece of business. Particularly when rookie director Dunsky, working from an off-Broadway play by Keith Reddin, keeps things tilted toward the surreal. For instance: On the occasion of his very first house call, the stumbling, Gump-esque Tommy not only convinces his middle-aged prospect (Kate Capshaw's Gale) to install a brand-new AR-SS9, he winds up in the sack with her. Not only that, Tommy and Gale undertake a torrid affair that ends with a startling jolt of violence--a commingling of comedy and tragedy that Theater of the Absurd playwrights from Albee to Pinter and beyond have ably traded on for two generations.
First, however, Dunsky has us purely howling. No sooner does Gale's overgrown son, Howard (Ryan Reynolds), discover the burglar-alarm salesman with his head up Mother's skirt than he regales the newcomer with the richly detailed story of his own sexual conquests. Not long after that, Tommy transforms himself into the slick TV pitchman for Grigoris Security, then decides that the best thing for everyone is to take his fiftyish mistress for dinner at his cartoon-strip parents' house in the alien Mojave Desert--an encounter that quickly degenerates into a drunken burlesque on family ties.
Can a double homicide be far behind? Suspicion falls on the obvious suspect: Heinrich, alarm salesman and schemer. Tommy, enflamed now, is convinced his boss did the deed: Enter a beating and a kidnapping, a test of faith and a moment of truth, all wrapped up in dark mirth. Then and only then does the William Morris Agency phone, offering Tommy a new career.
Playwright Reddin's irony-spiked comedy, albeit softened and humanized a bit by Dunsky for movie use, keeps us on our toes, watching and listening and laughing. Arquette makes for a likable dolt, and Tucci (fresh from his success with The Impostors) provides just the right wild hair of anarchy.
The movie loses some comic steam in its last twenty minutes, and its straight-faced subtext is sometimes too earnest for words: Does anyone on the planet need to be told again that in a dog-eat-dog world, truth and trust are rare assets? But at its best, The Alarmist suggests the dark farce of, say, Vincent Gallo's recent Buffalo '66--in which a paranoiac ex-con falls in love with his kidnapping victim--by way of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (1992). I also thought of David O. Russell's under-appreciated Flirting With Disaster (1996), wherein the quest of an unfulfilled Manhattan yuppie to find his biological parents yields a pair of aging hippie lunatics.
Is the new age of black comedy upon us, then? That's hard to judge, but The Alarmist is another alarmingly good sign that it might be.
The Alarmist.
Directed by Evan Dunsky. Written by Evan Dunsky, from a play by Keith Reddin. Starring David Arquette, Stanley Tucci, Kate Capshaw and Mary McCormack.
