Bartleby
With David Paymer, Crispin Glover, Glenne Headly, Joe Piscopo, Maury Chaykin, and Seymour Cassel.
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The nameless narrator of the original is a lawyer on the verge of retirement looking back on the events he describes from a distance of many years. (The opening sentence is “I am a rather elderly man.”) He recalls his small legal firm on Wall Street, whose business was mainly “rich men’s bonds and mortgages and title deeds,” where he employed two copyists and an office boy with the Dickensian names of Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nuts, each briefly profiled in Dickensian fashion. He then recounts placing an ad for an extra copyist and hiring Bartleby, whose surname is never given, described as “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn.”
After discovering that Bartleby is living at the office, apparently subsisting on just ginger nuts, the narrator, who notes that “nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance,” goes so far as to move his offices to another location–only to be told by the old office’s new tenants that Bartleby is still there and refuses to leave. In an attempt to help out, he visits Bartleby on the landing outside the office and suggests that he seek another kind of work. But Bartleby says he would prefer not to, though he also says, repeatedly, “I am not particular.” And he refuses to move temporarily into his former boss’s home.
Bartleby’s three other office mates–Vivian (Glenne Headly), Ernie (Maury Chaykin), and Rocky (Joe Piscopo)–are mainly this film’s invention, and they’re just as important as he is in establishing the sort of monotonous and alienating work climate that makes him meaningful. For all their eccentricities, Ernie and Rocky are plainly updates and elaborations of Turkey and Nippers. Turkey’s excess energy, which makes him prone to drip ink on documents, yields a very funny slapstick sequence involving Ernie wrestling with a toner cartridge; variations on Nippers’s sporty clothes, irritability, and wheeling and dealing are all evident in Rocky. But Vivian–a flirtatious word spinner who can’t be described as any version of Ginger Nuts–is plainly an addition to Melville’s story, and Headly plays her with such comic flair that she’s a welcome supplement. Her flirtatiousness and her fancy way of talking are made to seem functions of her boredom, and to give her more room to exercise them, another figure–Seymour Cassel’s Frank Waxman, a client–has been added to Melville’s small group of characters.
