You’re sure you want to be Elliott Gould in the 70s because you see what he is—in this case a snide, schmuckish middle manager at a bank—and want to be him anyway. Good god, his name is Miles. He beds a coworker, robs the bank by robbing the robber, and his apartment is immaculate. To be clear, none of this is cool. After he gets the money, he puts his age-appropriate colleague on the back burner and starts fucking a 25-year-old. The robber is psychotic, but at least he’s not a snake. The apartment seems to grow over time into the lair of a supervillain too anodyne for his own comic line. It’s where The Bourgeois Drip schemes and contemplates. At one point Gould’s housekeeper throws out the grape jelly where he’s hidden the keys to the safety deposit box where he’s stashed the money he stole. There are so many steps to this crime, you begin to admire people who beat their victims over the head and take their wallets. Like any white collar criminal, Gould’s greatest weapon is Procedure and his success depends on his mastery of flowcharts. He’s very, very easy to hate. And yet.
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