Movie Review
Fresh face Julio Torres breaks through with absurd and topical Problemista
Julio Torres in Problemista
The best thing about the art of movies is that there will always be someone willing to push the boundaries. Filmmakers like Charlie Kaufman, Yorgos Lanthimos, Wes Anderson, Kelly Reichardt, and more don’t play by the rules of more mainstream people, which makes their films stand out for movie lovers. Joining that list is actor, writer, and now director Julio Torres, thanks to his breakout film, Problemista.
Torres – who looks like a Latino Justin Long - plays Alejandro, an immigrant from El Salvador who’s hanging on by the skin of his teeth in New York City. He has a dream of landing a job with toymaker Hasbro (although his ideas are, shall we say, off-kilter), but takes other less-desirable jobs to maintain his work visa. As the film begins, he’s working for FreezeCorp, which hosts the bodies of people who’ve decided to freeze themselves in hopes of being re-animated in the future.
It’s there that he encounters the manic Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), whose artist husband Bobby (RZA) froze himself after a terminal cancer diagnosis. A mishap results in Alejandro getting fired, and since he needs a job to stay in the country, he soon agrees to be an assistant to Elizabeth, who is desperately trying to sell Bobby’s old paintings – all with an egg motif – in order to keep paying for Bobby’s storage.
Torres, who until this point was best known for writing on Saturday Night Live and co-creating the HBO show Los Espookys, has made a delightfully weird film with all sorts of fun details and slyly observant storytelling. With Alejandro almost always one step away from being deported, it is very much a contemporary immigration story. Torres makes sure to keep this part front of mind with repeated trips to an immigration lawyer and calls back home to Alejandro’s mother.
But the tone of the film is one of barely controlled absurdity, demonstrated in scenes showing Alejandro’s multiple roommates, his attempts at earning cash with side gigs, or, especially, his interactions with Elizabeth. Elizabeth is, to put it kindly, all over the place, with her seemingly ADHD mind never able to keep anything organized – her thoughts, her home, or – in a running gag – her database of Bobby’s paintings.
Somehow, Torres keeps the story on the rails by contrasting the opposite personalities of Alejandro and Elizabeth in highly entertaining ways. The pleasure of seeing the timid Alejandro - who sports a constant cowlick in his hair and has a kind of a bouncy way of walking - match up against the off-the wall Elizabeth - who’s never met a person she wouldn’t confront - has a consistency to it, and the film rarely dips in momentum.
Alejandro is the type of mild-mannered character that normally fades into the background, but Torres makes him eminently watchable with the previously-mentioned quirks and more. He holds his own against the tour-de-force performance by Swinton, who is scarily believable as the frenzied Elizabeth. Plenty of people are sure to know someone who exhibits similar traits, and she nails every nuance perfectly.
With a fun-but-odd story that also touches on a hot-button topic in a sincere-but-light way, Problemista may have a chance to gain a similar fandom to those who liked Everything Everywhere All at Once. Torres has established himself as an actor, writer, and director to watch – not bad for his feature film debut.
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Problemista is now showing in select theaters.
