An Immigrant’s Toy Story

Alejandro is from El Salvador, where his sculptor mother creates enchanting playgrounds that spark his imagination, and ours. As a child, he fills sketchpads with drawings of toys he wants to make. As an adult, the timid young man who literally tiptoes through life emigrates to the United States with the dream of designing for Hasbro.

He is the central figure in the gently deadpan, comically surreal satire “Problemista.” It is written, directed by and stars rookie filmmaker (and onetime Saturday Night Live writer) Julio Torres, a soft-spoken comedian whose hard targets are American bureaucracy, conglomerates and the New York artworld. Through his eyes, U.S. institutions appear as if designed by a tag team of Franz Kafka and Rube Goldberg.

While the filmmaker’s well-aimed shots aren’t likely to reform Immigration and Naturalization Services, Bank of America or Claris (Alejandro hates hates hates FileMaker Pro), they do elicit laughs, most of them well-earned.

Alejandro has a work visa through his employer, FreezeCorp, a cryopreservation startup that freezes the bodies of the terminally ill, presumably to be reanimated in the future when medicine can cure them. Yet even its CEO admits they’re not sure how, or if, they can safely defrost their clients. Unceremoniously fired when he trips over a wire and inadvertently unplugs a cryopod, Alejandro faces deportation. To stay in the U.S., he needs a sponsor who will vouch for his employment. When he tries getting an internship at Hasbro, the company informs him they only accept applications from citizens of the U.S. and its territories. 

Alejandro marks the time he has left in America by envisioning the falling grains of sand in an hourglass. All appears lost when Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), wife of the man in the cryopod, appears holding out the possibility of a job. 

Elizabeth is a “Karen” on steroids, an entitled onetime art critic with the disposition of a famished vampire and hair the color of inkjet magenta. She is as histrionic and confrontational as Alejandro is quiet and accommodating. To describe Swinton’s performance as “over the top” is understatement. Every New York noob encounters an Elizabeth and struggles to decide whether they are lucky or unlucky to get hired by one.

While Elizabeth strings along her unpaid assistant, Alejandro pays for his pricey immigration lawyer by surfing between Craiglist help-wanted gigs declaimed by an evil genie played by the rapper RZA. Some of the jobs are euphemistic, like “cleaning boy kink.” Others are indescribable, like his role as that guy on the street offering discounts to a nearby beauty parlor. The fact that not all of this “paid work” actually pays sets up Alejandro’s seriocomic face-off with a bank manager who aggressively defends her company’s policy of charging $35 per overdraft, a fee that increases exponentially with multiple charges on the same check.

At times the film feels like a string of comic sketches about everything that can go wrong when you start out in the big city. But Alejandro’s tenuous legal status adds an urgency that makes each situation both funnier and more poignant. This includes the film’s core paradox: He can’t work legally until he finds a sponsor, and he can’t live without working. Just when it seems Alejandro has fallen through every trap door, and gotten stuck in every trap imaginable, the unimaginable happens: Hasbro co-opts one of his ideas, illustrating how companies protective of their own intellectual property ride roughshod over the ideas of others. 

“Problemista” boasts three huge assets: Torres’ self-effacing performance, Swinton’s turn as a narcissist and the director’s visual storytelling gifts. All contribute to the success of a twist ending that may not make you feel any better about INS, but offers a hearty laugh worthy of O. Henry. All in all, a promising debut for a rookie director.