And speaking of different, how about a movie about a red-diaper baby whose life comes a cropper when, in middle-age, he confesses to his tax-lawyer boss that he’s never filed his taxes?
Not what you imagined, eh? What? EXACTLY what you imagined?
Josh Kornbluth is a guy who does one-man shows about his life, and one day his boss comes to see one of his shows, only to tell him that he laughed hardest at the part where Kornbluth joked that he’d never paid taxes. Josh sheepishly explains that it’s not a joke, and his alarmed boss makes him get in touch with a savvy financial adviser who assists him in paying his taxes for free. (Our Hero is charmingly, if somewhat distressingly, naive about this and doesn’t really look too deeply into what he’s agreeing to.)
Once he files, his life—sort of puttering along at this point—suddenly takes off. As he humorously notes, it’s as if being in The System was his ticket to prosperity. His show takes off. He gets a groupie—and in an aspect that is charmingly nerdy, he ends up planning to marry her. Hollywood calls him up to make screenplays. (Which are all based on unfilmable stories of glorious class struggle and revolution.)
Things come a cropper, however, when the IRS comes up with a figure for how much he owes them, and his newfound success comes with expenses he’s allowed himself to be unaware of.
The communist will ultimately be saved by the capitalist.
The climactic moment of the film comes when he’s talking with a tax expert—a guy who worked for Treasury for years—and trying to weasel out of this debt. The guy informs him that he, himself, is The Man. He’s the one who makes all the tax laws, by virtue of what he votes for, and what he endorses as a citizen. This has never occurred to him before, just like it’s never occurred to him that turnstile jumping is a fair betrayal of the public services he seems to endorse.
Naturally—Kornbluth is still a dyed-in-the-wool leftist, after all—he learns to stop worrying and love the Tax Bomb. As appalling a notion as that is for me, it definitely represents progress in the way of “Someone has to pay for all those things you want to give people. And by someone, we mean you.”
You. You’re The Man. You Pay.
It’s a charming story, told with bits of his stage act shown mixed with dramatizations of the stories he tells. Directed by his brother who, rather humorously, is much more handsome than the actor they hired to portray him.
The “Love” part.