“Nobody could be that stupid,” I kept telling myself during Craig Zobel’s indie drama Compliance, despite the fact that it opens with the screaming white-on-black legend BASED ON TRUE EVENTS. As it turns out, plenty of people are that stupid. Between 1992 and 2004, close to 70 incidents transpired across the country in which a prank phone caller persuaded the manager of a small-town grocery store or fast-food restaurant that he was a police officer and ordered him or her to strip-search employees or customers suspected of having committed thefts or other crimes. In workplace after workplace, managers who thought they were cooperating with local law enforcement stripped employees, conducted cavity searches, and even spanked them. The climactic incident, which Zobel dramatizes in his movie, took place in April 2004 at a McDonald’s in Mount Washington, Kentucky, and ended in charges of sexual assault.
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Zobel changes the names and sets the story at a fictional fast-food joint drolly named ChickWich for the chicken-heartedness of nearly everyone involved (imagine his delight when the Chick-fil-A brouhaha erupted this summer). I guess I wouldn’t mess with McDonald’s either, but judging from an excellent 2005 story by Andrew Wolfson in the Louisville Courier-Journal, Zobel does seem to have re-created the events in Mount Washington pretty closely. As in Kentucky, a young woman employee, Becky (Dreama Walker) is accused of theft, held for hours, strip-searched, and otherwise abused, all on the say-so of a voice on the telephone claiming to be an overworked cop; a master con man, he persuades not only the manager, Sandra (Ann Dowd), but Becky herself that she’s better off cooperating. Like a John Hughes movie hijacked by Roman Polanski, Compliance portrays the American workplace as a laboratory of human submission.
Notably, Zobel cuts to the caller only when someone in the restaurant dares to question him; Kevin (Philip Ettinger), a coworker of Becky’s, insists she’d never steal, much less deal drugs with her brother as the detective on the phone is charging. On the other side of the line sits a lanky, balding guy (Pat Healy, one of the con men in Great World of Sound) sucking on a soda from ChickWich. He’s clearly an old pro at this, and he knows how to insinuate himself with the people he’s calling, using a scrap of inside information from one person to authenticate himself with another. Besides, questioning authority isn’t exactly a trait prized in employees of fast-food chains. “You and I can sit here and judge these people and say they were blooming idiots,” remarks an FBI agent in the Courier-Journal story. “But they aren’t trained to use common sense. They are trained to say and think, ‘Can I help you?’”
Directed by Craig Zobel
