Director: Christopher Leone
Cast: Rainn Wilson, Lil Rel Howery, Aimee Carrero, Rob Riggle
Have I Seen it Before: That’s an interesting question. In all truth, I got to watch a screener of the film over a year ago as part of my duties on the screening committee of a film festival*. I don’t write reviews of those screeners. I’ve got any number of reasons for that. Some are so amateurish that one doesn’t want to kick someone when they haven’t yet realized they’re down. Others are perfectly fine, but for any number of reasons, will never see the light of day. Others are painfully average and yet destined to show up on your Netflix feed either way.
Code 3 was different. I’ll get to the details in a minute, but it is the only screener I have named as one of my five best films of the year. I loved it then.
Did I love it now?
Did I Like It: Yes, yes, I did. While Howery may at times be playing a slight riff on his TSA character from Get Out (2017), there is not one ounce of Dwight Schrute in Wilson’s performance. The fact that Wilson is not likely to get any awards attention—it’s a comedy, after all, and an independent one, at that—for this is something I object to in the strongest terms.
But nobody’s listening to me.
The film is funny throughout. More than enough recent comedies are content to be joke machines built around set pieces, but every ounce of humor in this film is character-based. There is a terrific pathos here, where these people with a thoroughly thankless and abusive job. I said just a moment ago that Howery is playing a variation on material he has done before, but there are oceans of more depth here. Watch this man try to calm down someone with a mental illness while the police are champing at the bit to escalate the situation. It’s beautiful, and heart-rending, and better than anything of which studio comedies could conceive.
But there’s something so much more here. Roger Ebert once complained that films were steadily becoming less and less about people at work. Fantasy—it has its place—displaces seeing authentic depictions of people trying to live and make a living. He made the observation in the 90s, and it only got worse, and got even worse still after Ebert’s passing. This film, however, is a perfect picture of what it is to have a job in the 2020s. Failure. Success. The deep-seated belief that some other job will be the solution to all your problems, but also the knowledge that will never be the case. I’ve never been a paramedic, but in this film, I felt seen and saw myself in those people.
When I first saw the film, I expected nothing, and it was a revelation. It hit the same way the second time.
Is there nothing better to find in a movie?
*I won’t mention what film festival here, as it might invite someone somewhere to try and curry favor over my admittedly negligible influence, but if you go looking, you might be able to figure it out. You might need a couple of guesses, though.