SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: Mickey Prohaska is one of those malignant weasels—issued not from nature but a cinematic vacuum—whose defining trait is contempt for a credulous world. True to his type, he’s a small town guy in sales—Mickey’s poison is insurance—who seems bitter about knowing it all. Films that open like The Convincer, Jill Sprecher’s bumpy tour of neo-noir territory, tend to make me a little bitter: Mickey’s (Greg Kinnear) 'We live in a world of bullshit" introduction creaks with conceit; in my experience the odds of a director building a character like Mickey out into something unexpected is about as common as insurance agents who really behave like nihilistic dirtbags. Which is not to say totally uncommon!
Mickey has no scruples of his own, a condition that seems to bear no explaining. Did the insurance racket do this to him or was he born bad? Certainly he has reason to be desperate: A separation from his wife (an underwritten part for Lea Thompson) has further strained finances already battered by a gambling habit. Mickey runs a branch of Lincoln Mutual, a Midwestern insurance firm (shades of another festival debut, Cedar Rapids), and attends depressing conventions where he offers Glengarry Glen Ross sales maxims to his lessers. One of those is Bob Egan (David Harbour), an earnest would-be agent who accepts a position with Mickey and is duly punished for his mistake.
When Bob is turned onto a potential client named Gorvy Hauer (Alan Arkin), an easily confused old man living alone in the country, Mickey pulls rank and closes the deal himself. It’s a short con that feels long, and the stakes are too dismally low for Kinnear and Arkin to make much of their scenes together. There’s a narrow, perfunctory feel to the story—things happen because the script needs them to—that isn’t broadened by the direction or the characters. Mickey is a non-starter as a moral conundrum, and his lack of inner conflict or complexity discourages investment in his actions. When the plot machine begins churning, he is further reduced from a two-bit insurance agent to a one-dimensional narrative one. Whether considered as a potboiler or a character piece (and the difference seems to be split), most of The Convincer feels like what it is: A set-up.
The literal set-up involves a violin that Gorvy has inherited from his recently deceased sister. While making one of his solicitous house calls to the old man, Mickey crosses paths with an antique violin dealer (Bob Balaban) interested in buying the violin for big bucks. Not on Mickey’s watch will an old, doddering man come into that much money; he sets out to 'handle" the sale himself, eventually replacing the actual instrument with a fake one. Randy (Billy Crudup) arrives on the scene to fit Gorvy’s home with an alarm system—one of Bob’s many, meddling recommendations—and Mickey’s feathers stiffen with something like recognition when he spots the handyman trying to pocket a clock.
In fact Mickey’s badness is bush league in comparison, as he learns very well when a scheme to get into the house and steal the violin leads to murder, a twist that confirms that Sprecher hasn’t built in a narrative suspension system capable of absorbing her massive leaps in tone. Instead of coiling tighter around the increasingly inscrutable Mickey (who seems to lose all of his game, as well as his ability to narrate, when Randy comes along) the film starts to unspool. Sprecher (who co-wrote the film with her sister Karen) is confident that the film’s extensive reveal will set the previous 90 minutes into illuminating, entertaining relief. But resolving events is not the same as redeeming them, especially if they failed to ignite with questions that burned for an answer.
