Outsourced
Directed by John Jeffcoat
Written by George Wing
and John Jeffcoat
Starring Josh Hamilton, Asif Basra and Ayesha Dharker
Classification: PG
***
A couple of winters ago I called a help line for problems with my computer.
"How do you like the weather?" asked the Indian-accented technician as he flipped through his manual. I assumed he was in a sweltering office in the outskirts of Bombay, engaging in scripted small talk.
"We're in the middle of a blizzard," I said. "How is it where you are?"
"About the same," he said. "I'm in Don Mills."
Outsourced, based on writer-director John Jeffcoat's sojourn to Southeast Asia, is a modest but deft little independent comedy about cultural expectations and the shrinking world of globalization. The topic has reached a critical mass in the last couple of years, not only as a hot American political issue but in popular culture as well. The same title is used for a concert DVD by Russell Peters, an internationally successful Canadian comedian of Anglo-Indian background, and as the title of an upcoming Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson comedy.
Jeffcoat's movie (co-written by 50 First Dates writer George Wing) follows the re-education of Todd Anderson (Josh Hamilton), a 32-year-old single manager of a Seattle call centre. The company specializes in selling, as he puts it "kitsch to rednecks," including a lot of patriotic knickknacks, such as eagle heads that play music, made in China for a market in the American heartland. His boss calls him in with some news: The call-centre is relocating to India and everyone in Seattle except him will be fired. He can stay and train the new group in India. If he quits, he'll lose his stock options.
Todd heads off to Bombay, sweats in his corporate shirt and tie, only to get lost at the airport on his way to the village of Gharapuri. Initially, the movie seems to reinforce a lot of North American stereotypes as the local Indian villagers risk coming across as a collection of adorable simpletons. They mispronounce his name and refer to him as "Mr. Toad." A street urchin hugs him and lifts his cellphone, and he has to learn the reason why he eats with his right hand and not his left. Indian food gives him serious digestive problems.
The call-centre employees are a compendium of comic types - the womanizer, the portly dweeb, the string-bean with the sticking-out hair. Todd's immediate underling, the sycophantic, 40-ish Puro (Asif Basra), lives with his parents until he can afford to marry. Puro's mother is concerned that Todd doesn't have a wife and children yet. At one point, a cow actually wanders into the call centre.
In a nice twist, though, the clichés are systematically reversed. Though the Indians don't get American slang, they're not sure they should. One of his employees, the attractive and super-competent Asha (Ayesha Dharker), asks Todd why it's necessary for Indian call-centre workers to pose as Americans while selling cheap junk made in China? And why they're obliged to mispronounce "Internet" as "innernet" just to sound more American?
In a desperate move to restore his sense of balance, Todd takes a long cab ride to Bombay to have a good old American hamburger. Instead, he meets his own guru, a fellow American (veteran New York stage actor Larry Pine), who advises him: "I was resisting India. Once I gave in, I did much better."
Soon Todd learns that he can achieve his company's bottom line, which is an MPI of six (meaning a six-minute-per-incident efficiency goal) by allowing the workers to customize their office spaces and dress the way they want to. His breakthrough comes when he lets them actually use the items sold through the company's catalogue. As much as Outsourced exploits cliché to reverse it, some of Todd's transformation has a ring of authenticity - once he relaxes his Western paranoia and superiority, he's humbled by the generosity of his new country. The local characters, whom Todd treats as naive, prove to have a higher sense of common human decency than he does.
Asha, his best employee, soon becomes a romantic interest, though even in this area, Outsourced does a smart job of reversing expectations. Both performances are refreshingly light as Hamilton, primarily a Broadway actor, becomes increasingly sympathetic as a man who allows himself to change. Dharker (whose résumé ranges from The Terrorist to Queen Jamillia in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones) is his pragmatic equal and her characterization of their relationship as a "holiday in Goa" flips the stereotype on just who is dallying with whom.
In its low-key way, Outsourced is something exceptional: A frothy romantic comedy that makes a serious point about the arrogance of treating human beings from around the world as interchangeable economic units.
Liam Lacey