Rich macho asshole and deeply unpleasant sleazebag Sam Farragut (Andy Griffith) is one of the richest, most lucrative and most important clients of an ad agency. He knows it too, and because he is that sort of man, he uses his position to belittle, manipulate and denigrate the poor guys who are in charge of his account. So the plan for a campaign using Baja California in Mexico as the backdrop for his campaign turns into him blackmailing his “favourite” ad executives into going on a dirt bike trip through the desert with him, or else. So off Warren Summerfield (William Shatner), his old colleague and work buddy Paul (Robert Reed) and young turk fancying himself an artist Terry Maxon (Marjoe Gortner) have to go with him, as if they didn’t have their own problems. Namely, Warren is in some sort of quantum state of being secretly half-fired, with Paul pegged as his replacement, while Warren is sleeping with Paul’s wife Nancy (Angie Dickinson) who clearly wants the also married Warren as a replacement for Paul in her life. Warren is also suicidal, and believes the trip might just be the way for him to kill himself and make it look like an accident, leaving a fat insurance policy for his family as some sort of ultimate, idiotic “I’m sorry I failed at being THE MAN SOCIETY TELLS ME I’M SUPPOSED TO BE!”. Terry for his part as problems admitting to himself that the work he is doing stands against all of his supposed values, and that he’s turning into a Yes Man for the worst kind of person possible, even though pretending Farragut isn’t the worst humanity has to offer is pretty much akin to talking oneself into a state of actual delusion.
Things don’t get better for anyone in Baja, not just because Farragut just loves to push everybody’s buttons, but because he’ll also turn out to be a murderer just waiting for an opportunity and a pretext.
I don’t generally fall into this jargon (it’s not really mine, philosophically), so when even I want to call Robert Michael Lewis’s TV movie about a trio of ad men, all broken in their own, distinct ways, and their horrible rich guy client a film about the destructive force of various 70s versions of toxic masculinity, it probably really is that. The script by Jack Turley isn’t exactly subtle about this either, doubling down on everything that’s dysfunctional about these men and how dangerous and oppressive this kind of dysfunctionality is for those around them; unlike a film made today would be, it’s not without compassion for these men (except for Farragut), though, so it will not only show them as the destructive forces they are, but also grief how they got there. It doesn’t show a terrible amount of hope for them ever getting better, alas.
Even the way the film side-lines the female characters after the first act for the main narrative thrust but never wants to quite lose sight of them seems to be a pointed, conscious choice, suggesting much about the divide between men and women the culture they live in will build, even when there’s love and an actual human connection between them.
Because that’s not quite enough for a little TV movie, apparently, Pray also adds an equally unsubtle yet effective criticism of a style of capitalism that seems to be build to create exactly this kind of behaviour in men, turning artists into yes-men, and middle-aged men bitter and self-destructive because they can’t quite keep up with the monsters.
Not surprisingly with this cast and the film’s themes, there’s quite a bit of scenery chewing going around, though it’s really Griffith (with the understandable relish of a guy who mostly played the aw-shucks Southerner in his career) and Reed who take the greatest bites, while Shatner, quite unexpectedly, turns in a comparatively nuanced (for his acting style, obviously) performance that makes quite a bit out of all the little hurts, betrayals and self-betrayals this character’s life has become, somehow making Warren more sympathetic than you’d believe.
With all of this going on, it’s not much of a surprise that the film’s actual thriller plot takes a bit of a backseat and is really just there to give characters the final push into the direction fate and the script need them to go; but then, that’s not so much a criticism than it is an observation.
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