Outsourced

  • Mike Gunn
  • Oct 12, 2007
  • Series: Film
    Outsourced

    Apparently when John Jeffcoat first plugged his screenplay to the Hollywood heavy weights they loved the script, but balked at the idea of having an unproven director direct the movie[M1] . Thankfully Jeffcoat took his script to a small independent company (Shadow Catcher Entertainment) and the result is one of the more delightful, original and funnier movies that any company has put out in over a year.

    Outsourced is a romantic, cross-cultural comedy about Todd Anderson a manager of a Seattle based customer call center until his job and the entire office is outsourced to Mumbai India. It gets even more sinister when Todd is manipulated by his insensitive, greedy boss to go to India to train his replacement. The movie does a wonderful job of presenting the beauty of India, and the cultural faux pas of many Americans traveling to such different and exotic cultures. While it is a movie about outsourcing and the subsequent consequences, it didn't preach, but did give us a thoughtful insight into some of the issues that result from outsourcing American jobs overseas, and the greed that appears to perpetuate it.

    While the movie made us think about outsourcing it presented it in a way that made you think, and forced us to look behind the symptom to the root of the issue, contentment. So many of the humorous moments in this movie centered on the differences between the two cultures. One of the funniest was the Indians use of the word "Rubber" for an eraser, which when Todd tried to tell them it meant a condom, they thought he meant condominium. But probably the most obvious difference between our American culture and many other cultures around the world is our lack of contentment. This seemed to be the movies theme. The call center in Mumbai was called the "Fulfillment" center, and when Todd finally returned to Seattle, he had the wooden sign from the call center in his living room, which appears as a reminder to him that fulfillment doesn't come in the form of pay days. He had left Seattle a consumer unfulfilled with a hectic lifestyle, and returned enlightened by the beauty of another culture. While he was a reluctant malcontent to begin with, he accepted the challenge of Asha (an attractive and witty Indian women whom he ended up falling in love with) to see India from their eyes, and not purely an American lens. It is when he did that (Especially by joining in their festival of Holi, and his symbolic baptism in their holy river) that he began to see his arrogance and lack of contentment. He had allowed himself to be taught by another culture, which was something that he clearly struggled with throughout the movie.

    What was also fairly unique in this movie, was that it didn't decry the evil of the American "Empire" while extolling the virtues of another culture. It merely gave us a glimpse of our own near sightedness, and allowed us to see some of the sublime and the ugly of the Indian culture too.

    While the movie dove into the issues of freedoms, individual rights, and contentment, it allowed you to laugh at yourself, and think clearly about what it means to be on this earth with 6 billion other people, and how it just may be possible that as enlightened as you may think you are, some of your practices may look barbaric to another. Outsourced does for cultural differences with humor, what "Crash" did with intensity and violence.

    It's a fun movie for most of the family! I would say there are some adult/sexual situations that may be inappropriate for younger children!

    Read more reviews from Mike Gunn at: http://past-the-popcorn.gospelcom.net/index.php/author/MikeG

    [M1]This came from an internet source?? That's why I use "Apparently"

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