The Beta Test

It takes prodigious comic gifts to make a loathsome, pathetic character so mesmerizing that you enjoy watching him dig himself into a hole for 90-plus minutes. Jim Cummings, the star, editor, co-writer, and co-director of "The Beta Test," has those gifts. 

Cummings plays Jordan, a remorseless, manipulative Hollywood agent working for a CAA-like behemoth who gets ensnared in a conspiracy in the months leading up to his scheduled wedding to his fiancee Caroline (Virginia Newcomb). His troubles start when he accepts an engraved invitation to cheat. This is not a metaphor: the invitation is elegantly inscribed and printed on purple card stock and sealed in a purple envelope. Jordan is instructed to arrive in a certain hotel room on a certain day at a certain time if he wants to experience a no-strings-attached tryst with a woman. Both partners will stay masked and anonymous. 

Jordan goes. He has a great time. The masks are also purple, of course. Then Jordan's euphoria fades and is replaced by paranoia. He was plenty paranoid even before he stepped out on Caroline, so this is bad. Jordan is secretly a highly functioning alcoholic (though he wouldn't describe himself that way). He takes a lot of personal and professional risks, most of them superficial, greedy, or nihilistic. He blurts out insults whenever he's dealing with anyone who has something he wants but isn't obligated to give it up. 

As Jordan plunges deeper into the mystery of who sent the invitation and what they meant to gain by it—at various points impersonating a police officer and a private detective, and threatening to sue people he just met—"The Beta Test" starts to feel like the unholy love child of "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Office Space." If my family's life depended on it, I couldn't tell you what this movie is narratively "about." The ending, which is confusing and feels slapped-on, only intensifies the sense that the production is a vibe pretending to be a message. 

There are digs at the major Hollywood agencies' war against the Writer's Guild of America, and commentary on the culture of abuse and exploitation that was considered an ingrained and expected part of white-collar entertainment industry employment till recently. And there are barbed attacks on the culture of entitlement that defines American businesses where fratty bros like Jordan congregate. (Move the setting to Wall Street or Silicon Valley and you wouldn't have to change anything but the insider humor.) 

I'll resist the urge to get deep in the weeds of the plot, because there's a lot of it, and it's questionable whether it fits together neatly and illustrates the movie's thematic concerns rather than setting up the next explosive scene between Jordan and whatever unfortunate soul he happens to be dealing with. The latter, I suspect, is the movie's true reason for being: maybe the filmmakers created a substantive, often hilarious main character and then built a project around him. Jordan incarnates the spirit of early 20th century "video or it didn't happen" disasters. He's a walking social media shame cycle, complete with insincere apology.

But if you can maintain a tone, you can keep an audience's attention, and Cummings and co-director/co-star PJ McCabe are more adept at maintaining tone than a lot of better-known filmmakers. Like Cummings' previous feature, the horror comedy "The Wolf of Snow Hollow," "The Beta Test" understands how to set up and pay off a joke by putting the camera in a particular spot and moving it to reveal or conceal a crucial detail. The movie is also adept at creating a cinematic version of the subjective voice in fiction, viewing Jordan in a detached, cool manner for long stretches, then moving us inside of his fevered brain long enough for him to mishear a statement by another character, which in turn triggers another panic attack, meltdown, or swan-dive into paranoia that is funny when we're in Jordan's head, and that becomes even funnier when we leave his consciousness and see him as others do.

Cummings has dark-and-slender, Billy Crudup-Jim Carrey leading man looks, and they intensify the self-lacerating nature of the character's outbursts. That the joke is ultimately always on Jordan makes the character amusing rather than merely unpleasant. He verbally abuses subordinates, co-workers, lower-level functionaries at retail shops and in his own apartment building, his own friends, and Caroline, often while pretending to have authority he doesn't possess (sometimes he comes on like Tom Cruise's "Eyes Wide Shut" character trying to gain access to inaccessible places by assuring the gatekeepers that it's OK to let him through because he's a doctor). Jordan's disruptive snits are usually followed by (or interspersed with) half-assed apologies that sound as if Jordan is saying what he believes society expects him to say, not what's in his heart.