Excess wealth has always been a rich topic for comedy because the power to act on any material whim tends to expose and even foreground people’s foibles. Rollo Treadway, the lonely millionaire played by Buster Keaton in The Navigator (1924), is so spoiled he gets his chauffeur to ferry him to a house across the street. In the Depression-era fantasy If I Had a Million (1932), W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth, whose treasured automobile has been totaled by a road hog, use a sudden financial windfall to buy a fleet of cars and purposely smash them into the autos of inconsiderate drivers. Even sophisticated comedies milk this idea: in Born Yesterday (1950), a millionaire junk dealer hires a journalist to turn his gum-cracking mistress into a Washington socialite. Wealth is more concentrated than ever now, which means the comedy of buying power still packs a mighty punch: just this spring the wacky Welcome to Me starred Kristen Wiig as a bipolar woman who wins $86 million in the lottery and decides to launch her own self-obsessive TV talk show.
Interviewed by the website Metro, Bujalski was candid about his motivation for using stars this time around: “Maybe I could get paid five figures? I have two kids and I have a mortgage. . . . I hate it when I see people in this situation who don’t admit they have to make money. So I have to say it. I’m trying to compensate for everyone who doesn’t say it.” Results ends with a goofy sequence in which Danny, persuaded by Kat to scale down his romantic ambitions, strolls into a local sorority house, announces that he’s a multimillionaire (but not “a douchebag”), and invites the sisters over to his place for a beer blast. All the other characters show up to dance to the jazz combo from the earlier scene, and the credits roll as they boogie down. It’s a decidedly light ending, but Results says as much about its era as any of its forerunners did: with the deck stacked against the little guy, sucking up to some fat cat may be your only salvation. v
Directed by Andrew Bujalski
