MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Advertising’: Fury Boils Over

It must have taken a heap o’ advertising to get British writer-director Bruce Robinson as livid as he is in his savage comic satire “How to Get Ahead in Advertising” (Goldwyn Pavilion Cinema, Westside Pavilion).

He has conceived of all the accumulated horrors of the ad game--seductions for the joy of smoking, lures for pimple creams and toilet-bowl fresheners, warnings against bad breath, denture offensiveness and foot odors--erupting as a boil on the neck of one clever, upper-class v.p. of the ad game, Dennis Dimbleby Bagley.

The nasty pustule appears as Bagley, a 15-year veteran adman with a late-blooming conscience, decides finally that, with his help “brains are being laundered daily,” and he is soul-sick about his part in it. Whirling in to see Bristol (Richard Wilson), the acerbic head of his agency, he quits. He is going to turn his talents to warning the world about the fallout from the joint venality of advertising and television, from false claims, from lies about safety, from outright perversions of the truth.

How is he going to reach these masses? Bristol asks blandly: “Walking up and down with a sandwich board? (That’s) Advertising, dear boy.”

It’s also a sample of the wit served up by “How to Get Ahead,” a full-scale diatribe written with the passion of a G.B. Shaw and delivered with assault-rifle speed and a zealot’s intensity by Richard E. Grant. This is Grant’s second collaboration with film maker Robinson; his first was as the unemployed and notably decadent young actor Withnail, in “Withnail and I.”

So just as a major player for good seems to be born, Bagley’s affliction arrives, this throbbing boil where his neck and shoulder join. What it turns out to be, by nasty stages, is a whole other personality, a minuscule new head which plans a takeover of Bagley’s mind and body. The new one is as much a spokesperson for the glories of ads as Bagley has become a crusader against them.

Watching, aghast from the sidelines is Rachel Ward as Julia, Bagley’s wife. If Grant has the showy role, a double one actually, when the small-mustached, false Bagley makes his appearance, then it is Ward who lands the pivotal one. She is, in one body, the most beautiful and compassionate wife imaginable, and the moral center of the piece. And she is radiantly fine.

“How to Get Ahead” (MPAA-rated R for language) is a strange piece, to be sure. It’s cruel, funny, knowing, never less than biting and occasionally brilliant. Pure fury seems to have driven Robinson to it; anger he alludes to as Bagley talks about the strong anti-smoking campaign he had created, which eventually was shelved after pressure from above. Her Majesty’s government, with its wishy-washy stand on package labeling, like its timid warnings on cigarette packs, is the target of his unleashed venom.

There are problems in creating something as simultaneously funny and unlovely as a talking boil. It’s possible that some audiences will lose interest once they learn that the effects are good but minor; the boil, even when grown to full manhood (boilhood?) isn’t a patch on The Fly. But then, this isn’t that sort of movie.

This is a blistering broadside, a warning for the safety of our souls. When Bagley scornfully decries the advertising double-think in which “oil companies are sold as champions of the environment,” Americans might well squirm. And when, on the subject of the rain forest, Bagley predicts that “within 25 years Brazilians will be fixing oxygen prices the same way that Arabs fix oil prices,” you may wonder if 25 years is too optimistic a guess.

Bagley is played with a glittering-eyed, diabolical intensity and outrage by Grant. Whether he’s giving a withering demonstration of an ad presentation guaranteed to annihilate the competition, or leaping around the gardens of his exquisite country house like Wile E. Coyote on speed, Grant is untouchable.

There is an awful power to Robinson’s rhetoric and an irrefutable logic. As one or the other Bagley (not fair to tell) rides up these green and pleasant hills at the end, delivering his credo for the world’s future, Robinson pulls out all satiric stops: this is Scarlett O’Hara’s speech about starvation and every brave harangue Britons ever listened to during World War II. And it’s enough to put a cold hand on your heart.