A Dumb, Lite Comedy That Makes Some Smart, Heavy Observations

Joe Somebody is a deceptive film, pretending to be one part romantic comedy and two parts office farce, but the secret to getting more out of the film than cheap laughs is to acknowledge what it really is: a smart social satire that takes a surprisingly frank, even disturbing, look at the state of modern American adult masculinity.

Considering that he has built much of his career out of poking fun at masculinity -- although rarely with as much cynical honesty as he does here -- Tim Allen is an apt choice to play the lead role. Allen stars as Joe Scheffer, an office drone with a remarkably unremarkable career and life. At the office, he has spent the last ten years exhibiting excellent work habits and positive results, but all to no avail; few of his co-workers know who he is, those who do view him with indifference, and a well-earned promotion that had been dangled in his face was given to another man a year ago. The only thing that ever really changes for Joe is that his wife has recently left him for a younger man, a pretty-boy actor more in tune with her own neuvo-hippy lifestyle.

In his whole pathetic life, Joe has only two things to be happy about: his relationship with his daughter, and his parking space. Joe doesn't have a private parking space, but he does take a small amount of pride in the fact that he has earned the right to park in the convenient "ten year parking lot," since employees with less than ten years have to trek all the way from the ridiculously inconvenient parking lot that is depicted as driving distance to the office.

Joe has never realized how much of his own happiness that he has invested into that parking lot until he loses his space to Mark McKinney, an arrogant brute played by a well-cast Patrick Warburton. When Joe rightly (but unwisely) challenges Mark's use of the Ten Year Parking Lot -- after all, Mark has been working at the office for less than seven years -- Mark brutally knocks Joe to the ground and threatens to beat him severely. Mark's cruelty is heightened by the fact that he is fully aware that coworkers, and even Joe's own daughter, are witnessing the event, adding an extra layer of humiliation to the beating.

This is the moment when Joe Somebody starts to reveal that it is less interested in cheap laughs than most Tim Allen movies are. Oh, there will be plenty of cheap laughs later, but for the moment, Joe Somebody is content to admit to the viewer that there is nothing comical about the beating that sets the story in motion, nor in the sequences that immediately follow: Joe is injured only very slightly, but his humiliation is so devastating that he cancels Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, and then refuses to return to the office for weeks. He's risking his job but doesn't care, he is too embarrassed to return to the location of his downfall.

The fact that Joe's beating causes a depression that lasts far longer than any of his injuries, and the movie's refusal to play Joe's depression for laughs, reveal the screenplay's brutal honesty about masculine self-image. A man may be intelligent, or meek, or white-collar, or possibly all three, such as the case of Joe, but these aspects of identity, while important on one level, are, on another, deeper level, nothing but sheets of paper armor that we use to clothe our insecurities, and all it takes is one slap to shred that armor to pieces and reveal that beneath the facade of civilization, we still judge our self-worth by our ability to, and willingness to, engage in violence if we are physically confronted. Put another way, mankind as a race may have emerged from the jungle millennia ago, but no singular man ever fully has.

In the movie, this harsh reality is confirmed by the office's reaction to the conflict between Joe and Mark. Despite the fact that Joe is a sweet man who did not deserve the humiliation and pain caused by Mark, Joe's co-workers have little sympathy for him, and even admit to thinking of him as a schmuck for allowing himself to be victimized; they view Joe with more pity than sympathy.

The driving plot point of the film is that Joe's self-image, and, just as notably, his image among other people, is brightened only by Joe's decision to challenge Mark to a re-match. As soon as Joe allows himself to sink to Mark's level, everything changes for the better: He feels better about himself, men suddenly want to be his friend, women suddenly want to be his lover, and even his office superiors decide to finally give him that promotion they had forgotten about.

The "voice of wisdom" -- all but drowned out by the multiple voices of reality -- is provided by Joe's daughter, played by Hayden Panettiere, and his love interest, played by Julie Bowen. Bowen's and Panettiere's characters are the only characters in the film who are dismayed by Joe's determination to fight Mark in a rematch, the only ones who see violence as folly. "But," the movie seems to argue, "of course they wouldn't understand, they're women."

There's no question that the movie uses exaggeration to depict the positive turns that come Joe's way due to his decision to announce an upcoming fight with Mark, but it would be a serious mistake to confuse such exaggeration with inaccuracy; the movie's denial of the conventional wisdom that "violence doesn't solve anything" may be grotesque, but it's also quite convincing. Why? Because, sadly, it's not just self-image that depends on a man's physicality, it's image in general. There's a reason why the observation that "nice guys finish last" has become a cliche.