Director Curtiss Clayton and screenwriter Daniel Handler (known in other circles as children's author Lemony Snicket) borrowed the plot for their movie Rick from Verdi's opera Rigoletto: It's the story of a lackey who tries to protect his daughter from the amorous attentions of his rich employer. But Rick's heavily stylized, dark comic thrust also resembles an extended subversion of A Christmas Carol. It takes place around the holidays, and stars Bill Pullman as a moneyed prick who reflects on the good person he used to be, while gaining an insight into the shallow life he currently lives, as well as a glimpse of his bitter fate. Of course, nothing goes exactly as it does in Charles Dickens' version, which makes Rick both challenging and pointless: Not only is nearly everyone in the movie a jerk, but they also know they're jerks, and they have no plans to reform.
Rick gets propped up in part by its unpredictably wavy narrative path. The film starts off black as night, with Pullman and his hyper-macho, sex-addicted boss Aaron Stanford belittling waitresses at an exclusive nightclub. After Stanford leaves, Pullman meets an old colleague (Dylan Baker) who offers to have Stanford killed so that Pullman can advance at the company. Then, just when Rick begins looking ridiculously bleak, the filmmakers introduce Pullman's teenage daughter (Agnes Bruckner), a penthouse-dwelling latchkey kid who carries on an anonymous online affair with Stanford. Precocious sexuality aside, the relationship between father and daughter plays surprisingly sweetly, as they bond over mutual grief for Bruckner's late mother.
But it's hard for Rick to maintain this jangled tone, which aims to be simultaneously heartbreaking and broadly satirical. The latter tack pushes Rick too far, and too soon. From the beginning, Clayton and Handler's vision of Corporate Guys (all back-slapping and peon-belittling) plays like a grotesque, one-note late-night comedy sketch, and the stabs at satire aren't aided by the oversized, twinkly sets, which look stunning but dwarf the action. Clayton and Handler may be going for operatic, but their take on the venal business world possesses the depth of a jingle.