Problemista Is Very Clever - A Review
A "Surrealist Comedy Film" that puts the "merry" in America.
Problemista is so very very clever.
Problemista is more clever than your cleverest friend, more clever than Keyser Soze in The Usual Suspects, and more clever than Donald Trump all put together! I know! How can you be more clever than a president?
Problemista is a Julio Torres film that brings together the visual talents of Tilda Swinton, Bobby Digital er... RZA (from the Wu-Tang Clan), Catalina Saavedra, Greta Lee, and a whole list of future stars and queens. You get to watch a movie about how Alejandro (Torres) has to navigate the United States system of entering the country all so he can take his toy talents to Hasbro. Alejandro has to make $6000 in 1 month AND find someone to sponsor him, so it's a good thing that Alejandro meets the acerbic hydra Elizabeth (Swinton) just as he gets fired from his job that freezes people like Bobby (RZA) that have a terminal illness. The hope with that place is that the world will figure out how to stop whatever illness they have before pulling them out.
As the tagline of Problemista is "Surrealist Comedy Film," you get to try and find joy in how it tackles all the things Alejandro has to do. We watch him finding new ways of collecting money, search engines that talk back, phone calls that play out in real life, visual art based on eggs and El Salvadoran sculptures, legacies, and Tilda Swinton's awful attitude that always seems to work. Elizabeth is fine at first but if you do something like bring out the wrong salad or enshittify (make tech worse) her phone keyboard she will yell at you. In front of everyone, she will take your responses and quickly tell you to stop yelling at her. She will become a different being entirely. If you can't get her File Maker Pro working you’ll become so stressed you’ll dream she could kill you while you sleep. Elizabeth’s main goal is to find a way to help Bobby leave a legacy! Bobby deserves his own show and she takes on via her attitude and the assistants she hires like Alejandro or Bingham.
Problemista shows us just how hard it is to navigate the United States immigration system. It dives into how hard it is to learn to control the system you’ve trapped yourself in. Problemista even takes on the banking system and how an $8 dollar sandwich could cost you $43 dollars once they tack on an overdraft fee. Why wouldn’t a bank stop your card from working? It’s because banks hate you. I've been there before and on some level, like this movie, I made it out somehow. It wasn’t by writing getting paid for writing awesome reviews and it wasn’t for introducing people to my amazing music. It was only by getting ahead of the fees, killing my account before they could catch me overdrafting again, and moving to Cambodia. Problemista shows you that it’s so difficult to get your US paperwork right, it makes you want to quit before you even start.
When you see what Alejandro is willing to do to live his dream of making toys for Hasbro, it makes you question any time you've had a goal of your own that you put down and could have taken more seriously. With every lesson Alejandro experiences in this film, he seems to end up with at least two more problems. It's maddening, but it's also how things work in this country. Becoming more privy to how the Uber drivers, scammers, and desperate kinksters around you work will give you a lot of things to understand. You have an opportunity to experience the unfairness of the system in which we live one adventure at a time.