Alaska Employment Law

Now here are a couple of movies that you should definitely track down.  The principal one is called The Square; the same filmmakers, Nash and Joel Edgerton, also offer us a 9-minute preliminary short film called The Spider, which should not be missed.  The plots are unrelated.  The themes are very much alike.  I won’t say more about The Spider.

Anyway, The Square is a piece of Australian film noir about a pair of lovers, Raymond and Carla, who are cheating on their spouses.  Ray is middle-aged, a construction supervisor, with a loveless marriage to his boring wife, Martha.  Carla, a hairdresser, is younger, sexier and married to the ghastly Smithy, a low-level mobster with a towing business and a small record of crime.  They don’t appear to love each other either.  Carla is tired of hearing Ray’s middle-aged false promises to leave his  boring wife.  One day, she discovers a duffel bag full of cash in the attic above the laundry room at home.  She rightly suspects Smithy of criminal activity, and persuades Ray to join her in a plot to remove the money and flee (god knows where - where do people think they will go?), to live happily ever after.  “How can Smithy tell anyone about the money?” she asks Ray.  “It’s stolen.”  Ray is dubious.  Still, he proceeds with the scheme and hires some help.  Naturally, something goes terribly wrong, and Ray finds himself in very deep trouble, implicated with Carla in an awful crime.The genius of The Square is how inexorably each wrong step follows the last one.  As critic Roger Ebert notes, “More horrible things happen in this film than are probable in any scenario short of a large anvil falling from the sky and flattening the town, but it remains mostly plausible from scene to scene.”  In other words, in Ray’s shoes you might well do the very same stupid things.  There are many delightful twists before the final shocking one.  (Along the way, Smithy’s dog is eaten by a shark.  That’s not the shocking one.)

This is a great little movie, and highly recommended.  Try to find it.