I caught The Weinstein Company’s The Promotion last night — for all intents and purposes the directorial debut of Steve Conrad, writer of The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness — and I rather adored it in a small, to-scale way. The story of two mid-level Chicago supermarket employees (Seann William Scott and John C. Reilly) who compete for a
coveted managerial post at a new store location, it’s not for all tastes, I’ll concede, and I don’t want to oversell it — it’s not flat-out great. But it’s one of the most steadfastly low-fi movies about male existential crisis I’ve ever seen, and I appreciated that it kept surprising me in small but meaningful ways. Plus Jenna Fischer costars in a small role as Scott’s wife, and she’s always a welcome sight, let’s face it. No idea what the crap is up with Conrad’s Chad Schmidt, starring Brad Pitt (if anyone in the know knows, drop me a line), but this did certainly further whet my appetite for that.