Review: Bruce Robinson’s ‘How to Get Ahead in Advertising’ on Criterion Blu-ray

In Bruce Robinson’s debut feature, Withnail and I, the permanent scowl of Richard E. Grant’s character speaks to his anger at a world that fails to acknowledge his genius, his features made more gaunt and lifeless by alcoholism. The actor channels much of the same body language and aura as Withnail in Robinson’s 1987 sophomore feature, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, to play advertising executive Denis Bagley, though here the shambolic sense of grievance is replaced by mercenary superiority.

In the film’s opening scene, Bagley presides over a meeting where he exalts a closed ecosystem of advertising, bragging through a dagger smile that they can sell junk food to the masses and advance body-image standards to guilt those same consumers into buying fad-diet products. Bagley sees everyone as lemmings whose hypocrisies are made to be exploited, and to the point that he even ruins dinner parties with friends, taunting them with how easy it is to manipulate their subliminal desires to buy, buy, buy.

Bagley meets his match when he’s assigned the task of selling a new cream for treating boils. Something about the absurdity of the product triggers his deeply repressed sense of shame, and suddenly he’s filled with self-revulsion. If Bagley earlier drove companions and his long-suffering wife, Julia (Rachel Ward), to want to leave any room he occupied, now they look on in genuine terror as he raves like a madman about the consumerist evils he long celebrated.

Grant’s physicality is so magnetic that How to Get Ahead in Advertising arguably falters in manifesting Bagley’s psychic break by the emergence of a sentient boil on his shoulder that becomes the embodiment of his earlier greed, which can’t be fully eradicated by the man’s sudden change of heart. Deriding the new, moral Bagley as a communist, the boil attempts to assert control over Bagley’s body, which it eventually does. Now confined to the boil, Bagley’s softer side can only bear witness to his worse half acting without restraint.

The film’s pivot into body horror literalizes Bagley’s internal conflict and gives Grant a means of oscillating back and forth between moral polarities. But the grotesque prosthetics also feel redundant in the face of how well Grant was already playing a split personality.

Similarly, the film spirals out of its initial focus on advertising into a scattered series of barely connected invectives against Margaret Thatcher’s England. Bagley’s rants start to become less an insight into his frayed mental state than an earnest expression of Robinson’s own splenetic and ultimately unfocused vitriol. The tussle between the man’s two dominant personalities gives How to Get Ahead in Advertising a narrative through line to keep things moving, but long sections of the film grind to a halt for no other purpose than to let Bagley pontificate.

These rants don’t yield any particularly compelling insights about the commodification and dehumanization of consumer culture, often feeling like retreads of Howard Beale’s entrancing yet addled diatribes in Network. Nonetheless, the go-for-broke intensity of Grant’s performance remains magnetic. It’s one of the few pieces of acting by someone other than Nicolas Cage that approaches that actor’s best work, of throwing oneself into absurdism so fully that one emerges less a clown than a pure reflection of all the contradictions and hypocrisies that make up an individual. If Robinson’s script spreads itself too thin, Grant embodies the true insanity of trying to perceive just how vast the broken and manipulated system that shapes us really is.

Image/Sound

This transfer, sourced from a 2K restoration, perfectly captures everything from the antiseptic smoothness of the off-white walls of offices to the garish textures of Bagley’s decaying and mutating body as his boil grows more facial features. Every cracked bit of skin caked in dried yellow pus is uncomfortably crisp, and the image consistently displays stable color balance and contrast. The modest soundtrack presents the dialogue-forward audio with no issues, keeping the protagonist’s increasingly loud, frantic rants in front of all other elements in the mix.

Extras

Criterion’s disc comes with a new program featuring interviews with writer-director Bruce Robinson and actor Richard E. Grant discussing Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising. Robinson self-deprecatingly describes his writing process as more an act of crafting dialogue than story, while Grant amusingly casts the filmmaker as a secret tyrant demanding that his actors nail the sound of said dialogue that he heard in his head while writing it. While the focus of the interviews leans more toward Robinson’s second feature, both men find connections between it and Withnail and I, and Robinson elaborately details how the narrow focus of his spoof on advertising cynicism was a stand-in for his far-ranging hatred of the Thatcher government and its reverberating impact on all aspects of British life of the 1980s.

In a booklet essay, critic David Cairns sets the film in a larger context of macabre satires like Dr. Strangelove. He also pinpoints the layers of thematic irony in the way that Bagley’s attempt to condemn his profession becomes itself an advertising campaign.

Overall

Bruce Robinson’s scatterbrained satire is a showcase for Richard E. Grant’s genius, and Criterion’s Blu-ray presents its unexpected body horror in all its hideous detail.