Director of 'The Promotion' deftly balances humor with pathos

Foreclosure, divorce, the economy and the workplace may not sound like the building blocks of a riotous comedy.

But as filmmaker Steven Conrad points out, just because you're trying to make people laugh doesn't mean you can't sneak in a little drama too. In "The Promotion," the directorial debut of the screenwriter of "The Weather Man" and "The Pursuit of Happyness," Conrad incorporates all of the less-than-amusing subjects above _ and still manages to be very funny.

"I watched Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd movies like crazy when I was growing up, because my dad was a silent movie fan," said Conrad, 39, a Fort Lauderdale native, over a quickly inhaled lunch in Miami. "Those movies were set in the real world and showed people needing food because they were hungry. But they were still funny."

In the silent era, there weren't yet enough movies for audiences to think in terms of genre, so filmmakers made whatever kind of movie they wanted, combining sadness, beauty and comedy within the same film.

But today's demographics-driven, audience-tested Hollywood films tend to stick to one particular tone. "There's a push from studios not to confuse the issue too much, because audience test scores prove their appetites have become very compartmentalized," Conrad said. "And I get that. When you go to a dinner party and someone is walking around with a tray of appetizers, you always ask what it is before you eat it. You don't want to eat something without knowing what it is, because then you can't get ready for it. It to helps to have a menu."

Neither audiences nor distributor Paramount Pictures had a menu for 2005's "The Weather Man," the first in an unconnected (and purely accidental) trilogy of films written by Conrad about men struggling to strike a balance between family and career. That movie, which starred Nicolas Cage as a Chicago TV weatherman contemplating a job offer that would move him away from his estranged kids and ex-wife, proved to be too dark and melancholy for moviegoers who bought a ticket for the wacky comedy its misleading marketing campaign promised.

Conrad fared better with his script for 2007"s "The Pursuit of Happyness," which was written as a straight-ahead drama that drew on Will Smith's charisma to inject humor into the fact-based story of a penniless single father struggling to raise his son and pursue his career aspirations.

With "The Promotion," Conrad seems to have honed the perfect balance between laughs and pathos. The film centers on the growing rivalry that develops between Doug (Seann William Scott) and Richard (John C. Reilly), two assistant managers at a Chicago supermarket vying for the same manager's spot at a new store scheduled to open in the neighborhood.

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Although Conrad says the three films were never intended as a trilogy, he also recognizes the similarities in their subject matter. "It's all I write about now _ how hard it is to come by success, how it challenges us, what weaknesses it draws out of us to compete," he said. "Mostly it's about having been unemployed and having had trouble finding work after becoming a father. Before I wrote 'The Weather Man' and 'Pursuit,' I was writing stories about things we want, not things we need. I found that difference to be elemental for me."

The supermarket in "The Promotion" is a rich source of humor for Caplan, who mines sights and situations familiar to anyone who has ever set foot inside a Publix: The punks who loiter in the parking lot making trouble, the guy who "samples" products then sneaks them back onto the shelf, the row of 8x10 smiling portraits of the staff that greets customer when they enter the store.

The passive-aggressive war that Doug and Richard wage against each other, too, will seem hilarious to anyone who has ever competed with a co-worker, or even been passed over for a deserved position. There may be no more ruthless arena than the battlefield of the workplace.

But when "The Promotion" delves into the motivations behind Doug and Richard's yearning for the manager's spot, Conrad sets the frivolous humor aside and depicts a very realistic portrayal of working-class families struggling to make ends meet and men who pride themselves on their traditional roles as providers, but are quietly ashamed at their inability to fulfill their part.

In one scene, Doug's girlfriend (Jenna Fischer) tries to ease his financial angst by offering to take on a night job, which he interprets as a failure of his masculinity. "Female lions do the hunting," she says as a way of making him feel better. "I'm not a lion," he replies. "I'm a guy."

The themes of self-disappointment and identity crisis were also prevalent in "The Weather Man," but Conrad says that film's failure taught him a lesson as to how far he can push the audience and still keep them laughing.

"The lighter tone of 'The Promotion' was definitely a conscious reaction to 'The Weather Man,'" he said. "That is not to say I wasn't satisfied with that movie: I was, absolutely. But I think that movie compounded some harsh observations about how hard personal happiness is to come by and how unlikely it may be for most of us with the dead of winter, which is already somewhat of a downer.

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"We also had a character die in that film. We treated it pretty briefly, but I think those three things together were too much. So in 'The Promotion,' I wanted to deal with private dissatisfaction in a sunnier environment, because feeling blue or uncertain about your future is not relegated to winter. I feel that way spring, summer, winter and fall."

Since so much of "The Promotion" takes place at one location, the film's budget was low enough ($6 million) for Conrad to convince producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein to give him his shot at directing. "Those guys scrutinized the movie like crazy," Conrad said. "They watched the rushes every day. I think Bob knew he could fire me if he didn't like what was going on."

But despite the Weinsteins' reputation for sometimes being too hands-on, Conrad says the brothers let him do his thing.

"The only thing Bob asked me to stress in the script was that these are guys who are trying to do their job well," Conrad said. "He had a personal beef with most workplace comedies in which the characters do their jobs ironically or half-assed. That doesn't square with the way Bob sees the world. He thinks most people get up in the morning and work like hell in order to get ahead. And if you take the time off from your job to mess around, you"re going to get passed up in America. That's what this movie is ultimately about, really."

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© 2008, The Miami Herald.