Bartleby

Perhaps I'm too much of a literalist to stomach a thickly ironic, extremely low-budget adaptation of Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" set in an eerily sterile modern office. Or perhaps this update of the conceptual tale about a boss driven crazy by an uncooperative employee really is as under-rehearsed and lifeless as it seems. Crispin Glover (Charlie's Angels, Willard) turns his quiet, uneasy, string-bean quirkiness up full-blast as the title character, a paper-pusher in a government records office who upsets his fidgety boss's (David Paymer) subservient existence when he simply stops working one day--answering every order and request with "I would prefer not to." Writer-director Jonathan Parker seems to be going for a cross between Melville's cog-in-the-wheel allegory and something akin to Being John Malkovich. But what he ends up with is an inaccessible, badly-acted farce with community theater production values that doesn't live up to its surreal and absurdist trappings. Not recommended. (R. Blackwelder)