Land of the Meek, and Home of the Deeply Blue

It is tempting to overpraise “Kabluey,” a bittersweet indie comedy whose hapless protagonist, Salman (Scott Prendergast), spends a good part of the movie waddling along the side of a highway in a blue foam-rubber suit. Dressed as Kabluey, the corporate mascot of BlueNexion, a failing Internet company in Texas, Salman is paid $6 an hour to attract attention.
More About This Movie
Overview
Tickets & Showtimes
New York Times Review
Cast, Credits & Awards
Readers' Reviews
Trailers & Clips

View Clip...
Skip to next paragraph
As motorists stop to gawk at this featureless blob with a giant round head, Salman’s job is to distribute fliers advertising office space in BlueNexion’s sleek, nearly deserted headquarters. Because he can’t hold the fliers in his inflated paws, Salman has to keep them tucked under one arm, from which they are continually slipping and scattering onto the road.
To be trapped all day inside this costume with the sun beating down on him may be hell. But as enraptured children cling to Kabluey as if he were a cartoon legend sprung to life, Salman finds an odd kind of transcendence in the work. He becomes two people: one a lost 32-year-old boy cowering inside the suit, the other the adorable, bobbing and shuffling Kabluey who inspires cuddly affection.
Midway through the movie Salman meets another professional buffoon, a man outfitted as a giant Gouda cheese who dispenses tidbits in front of a supermarket. Together the two, fully costumed, eventually engage BlueNexion’s sleazy, womanizing chief executive (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) in a slapstick brawl.
Mr. Prendergast, an alumnus of the Groundlings comedy troupe, wrote and directed “Kabluey,” which is very funny in a ghastly way. All the characters — be they the gossipy, backbiting Austin, Tex., equivalents of television’s desperate housewives or Salman’s morose fellow passengers on the bus to work — suffer from excruciating boredom. It is a malaise that rises like steam from the flat, Middle Western landscape in which the corporation’s emptied offices symbolize an economy going bust.
Salman is the nerdy brother-in-law of Leslie (Lisa Kudrow), an overstressed mother bringing up two hellions, Cameron (Cameron Wofford) and Lincoln (Landon Henninger), while her husband, a National Guardsman, fights in Iraq. When informed that her husband’s tour has been extended by several months, Leslie visibly crumples. No one is better than Ms. Kudrow at playing emotionally bedraggled women hanging on by their fingernails, and your heart goes out to her, even when she behaves atrociously.
Enlisting Salman as a live-in baby sitter is the solution of last resort for Leslie, who is forced to take a job at BlueNexion to pay for her children’s health insurance. Salman, unemployed and homeless after losing his last job as a laminater in a copy shop, nervously accepts the invitation. In the recent epidemic of comedies about 30-something men in the throes of severe arrested development, he is one of the most pitifully incompetent losers.
Cameron and Lincoln hate Salman on sight. “I’m going to kill you,” hisses Cameron, the older and meaner of the two. And their pranks, like sprinkling cleanser on Salman’s eyes and mouth while he is asleep and putting thumbtacks in his breakfast cereal, show they mean business.
Salman takes the harassment in stride. He leads the rampaging little monsters on leashes to the supermarket and ties them up outside the store like dogs.
If Salman suggests an Adam Sandler character, Mr. Prendergast plays him like a long-suffering Buster Keaton stumblebum; he is so far beyond misery he is practically mute. Mr. Prendergast gives him the wide vacant eyes of a silent clown who is so resigned to a life of humiliation that his face has lost any expression, save for his mouth, which gapes in an attitude of befuddled amazement.
The plot of “Kabluey,” which operates on surreal cartoon logic, doesn’t bear close scrutiny. There are holes everywhere. When Salman gets the job as Kabluey, which Leslie finds for him, the crisis that brought him into the family is nearly forgotten. Who is caring for the boys? Toward the end the movie takes a queasy turn toward the saccharine.
The film’s distance from factual reality oddly enhances its bleak underlying vision. It portrays a demoralized American work force fearfully going through the motions of life while waiting without much hope for things to get better.
“Kabluey” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has some strong language and sexual situations.
KABLUEY
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Written and directed by Scott Prendergast; director of photography, Michael Lohmann; edited by Lawrence Maddox; music by Roddy Bottum; production designer, Walter Barnett; produced by Rick Rosenthal, Gary Dean Simpson, Rhoades Rader, Jeff Balis and Doug Sutherland; released by Regent Releasing. At the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes.