Peter Gerety: Now there’s an actor, turning 80 this month, who knows how to do a little while conveying a hell of a lot.
On “The Wire,” on “Sneaky Pete,” on “Ray Donovan,” in dozens of film and stage projects, Gerety projects no-nonsense authority, garrulous in one role, quietly threatening in another. He’s a character actor with a name that may not be familiar. The face is, though. And the face is one of the chief reasons the Chicago-made independent feature “Working Man,” which makes its VOD streaming premiere Wednesday, is worth your time.
The actor keeps everything close to the vest as Allery Parkes, longtime employee at a plastics factory known as New Liberty. (The factory sequences were filmed at Mackray Manufacturing in Norridge; Mackray closed late last year.) For years, this man’s routine has been set in habitual stone. A few muttered words to his wife, Iola (Talia Shire), at breakfast, then out the door with his lunch pail and Thermos and a passing “see you at dinner.”
But the factory is closing. The movie, a workmanlike first-time feature from writer-director Robert Jury, begins with Allery’s dreaded final half-day of work, then a puny severance check. And that’s the end of it. And yet it isn’t: As if guided by an unseen hand, Allery breaks into the shuttered plant the following morning and, though there’s no power anymore, starts cleaning up the place. Longtime co-workers who live on the same street wonder what the quiet, gruff, middle-class relic has in mind.
“Working Man” soon develops into a story of wary-but-promising friendship between Allery and Walter (Billy Brown), a relative newcomer to town and, like Allery, suddenly out of work and wondering what’s next. For these two, “next” means taking advantage of the unused materials and open orders waiting to be completed. Against the factory’s corporate ownership wishes, the men get to work, soon with the help of many other laid-off co-workers, producing the goods for shipping as if nothing had changed.
There’s a pretty good plot development (not big enough to be called a twist) around the two-thirds point in “Working Man.” It shifts Jury’s emphasis toward more overt fireworks. Even when the writing settles for synthetic confrontation, the actors make it as authentic as possible. In other words, you put up with lines such as “Last thing the company needs is some broken-down geriatric getting left behind!” if performers as canny as Gerety, Brown and Shire are there to humanize the characters on screen.
The movie was made cheaply and quickly a couple of years ago, shooting over 20 days in Chicago at locations such as Las Palmas restaurant in Wicker Park and Ed’s Way Food Mart in Forest Park. (The Joliet exteriors suggest the movie takes place in a Joliet-scaled river town.) Many who take a chance on “Working Man” come from similar places and memories of similar factories facing similar fates.
Anything made well in advance of the pandemic feels like a weird period piece these days, of course, yet Jury’s small, affecting picture fits snugly within the pandemic realities of 2020. On the other hand, the Parkeses haven’t any money troubles, really; their problems are more about psychological barriers and buried grief. Their story is taken up with a shared family tragedy that has turned Allery into a clam waiting to be pried open, and then put to good use once again. Shire’s character, conventionally drawn, is there to do the necessary prying. Yet watching Gerety delineate this taciturn man’s actions and feelings, one small detail at a time, the conventions become somehow real.
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‘WORKING MAN’
3 stars
No MPAA rating (some language)
Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Now streaming: $3.99-$4.99 rental on iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play and other streaming platforms.
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