“Problemista” is the most Tilda Swinton movie I’ve ever seen. By that I mean it’s odd through and through, with characters and situations I hope to never encounter in real life.
Writer/director Julio Torres (who created the 2018-22 HBO series, “Los Espookys”) plays Alejandro, a Salvadoran immigrant who dreams of being a toy designer at Hasbro. But they’re not hiring, so he takes a crappy job with a dicey cryogenics company that freezes terminal patients with the hope of defrosting them in the future when there’s a cure for what ails them. There’s a mishap with the cryo-container Alejandro is monitoring, which contains Bobby (RZA), an artist whose wife, Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), is really good at raising her voice and getting what she wants.
When Alejandro is fired, he panics because he only has thirty days to get a new job and visa sponsor to stay in the USA. Elizabeth, whose hair color looks like an explosion at the Crayola factory, is a manic mess oblivious to anyone else in the world. She hires Alejandro to document Bobby’s many paintings, all of which have a giant egg in them, for a gallery show she hasn’t sold yet.
From that point on, “Problemista” goes down a rabbit hole similar to the one Griffin Dunne found himself in during Martin Scorsese’s 1985 urban nightmare, “After Hours.” In that movie, the antagonists included crazy women making papier-mache sculptures while the neighborhood chased him as a suspected murderer.
In Torres’ hell, the enemy is the immigration system. When Alejandro, broke and unemployed, goes to a lawyer for help securing a visa, he’s told it will cost $6,000 — but the law says it’s illegal for him to make money from a job without documentation. Meanwhile, he can’t pay the rent on his room in a tiny New York City apartment he shares with two other oddballs, so he sublets it and tries sleeping on the couch. “Tries” is the operative word there.
As for Swinton, she steals every scene she’s in, making Elizabeth a whirling dervish of anxieties, privilege, and constant tech issues — some real (waiting hours on hold to get help from a human being instead of a customer service bot) and some imagined (she’s oblivious to the flashlight on her iPhone always being on). There isn’t a single frame in “Problemista” when Elizabeth is calm, and Swinton plays every bit of the role at full energy.
Torres has packed “Problemista” with all sorts of bizarreness, including anthropomorphizing Craigslist with ad listings no one should ever click on, like “cleaning boy kink.” Some of it works, with a few laugh-out-loud moments (e.g. a ride on the tram from Manhattan to Roosevelt Island), but overall, I didn’t love it or hate it.
So, “Problemista” gets a middling grade of 5 out of 10. Opens today in theaters.