I can’t explain exactly why, but I find it incredibly moving that Natasha Lyonne has remained so friendly with her costars and collaborators across nearly 40 years in showbiz. Earlier this season, Lyonne gave a small but pivotal role in a Poker Face episode to Kevin Corrigan, who in addition to being a one-of-a-kind character actor was also Lyonne’s co-star in her breakout film, 1998’s Slums Of Beverly Hills. In this week’s “Sloppy Joseph,” she gives another substantial supporting part to David Krumholtz, who played her brother in that movie. The episode was directed by Adam Arkin, whose father Alan played her father in Slums. Lyonne stays true to her hive.
Krumholtz plays J.B. Turner, a recently widowed father working as a custodian for a prestigious private elementary school, which gives free tuition for his son, Elijah (Callum Vinson). Elijah is quirky and shy and hasn’t made many friends at the school, outside of one of his classroom’s pets: a gerbil named, quite inappropriately, “Joseph Gerbils.” But the kid is a decent amateur magician, and he’s been a good enough student to earn a string of gold achievement stickers, which are stuck up next to his name on the class’s magnetic bulletin board.
In fact, in the gold-star chase, Elijah’s getting close to overtaking the school’s best pupil: an outwardly perky but inwardly devious overachiever named Stephanie Pearce (Eva Jade Halford). So when Stephanie learns that the winner of the school’s talent show will score 30 gold stars, she sabotages Elijah’s planned magic trick. When Elijah tries to make Joseph disappear—a sure-fire winning performance—he ends up accidentally obliterating the rodent with a sledgehammer and splattering his classmates with gerbil guts.
Arkin—working from a Kate Thulin screenplay—has a lot of fun playing around with subjective reality in this episode. Everything leading up to Joseph getting sloppified is shot at low angles, keeping the adults’ faces out of frame. The approach is reminiscent of Peanuts TV specials, Chris Ware comics, and Wes Anderson movies…with just a touch of Village Of The Damned in the depiction of the devil-child Stephanie. (The most hellacious moments are scored with Prodigy’s heavy EDM track “Spitfire.”)
Once we get to the circle back—and find out that Charlie has been working at the school this whole time as a lunch lady—we also learn the full extent of Stephanie’s reign of terror. The daughter of casino owners, she has been blackmailing the school’s gambling-addicted principal Dr. Hamm (Margo Martindale) into letting her sneak around the grounds at will. Wherever she roams, she often uses her tablet computer to grab incriminating pictures and videos of staffers and students. Throughout this episode, often we’ll be watching a scene and then find out that Stephanie is secretly watching too (and recording!) when the camera pans over and catches part of her cutesy tablet case. It’s a nifty bit of visual storytelling.
Stephanie’s snooping leads directly to Elijah’s magic-trick tragedy. While spying on Elijah’s rehearsal in J.B.’s janitor closet, Stephanie notices that J.B. has an adorable photo of his son in a diaper. Stephanie grabs that picture to use in the slideshow she is “helpfully” putting together to introduce the talent show. She then tips Elijah off about his impending humiliation; and when he runs off to keep his diaper photo of the slideshow, she flips his magic box upside-down, making it so that he can’t slide open the trapdoor that would’ve kept Joseph safe. (In the prestidigitation trade, this is called “misdirection.”)
Charlie is working at the school because, as she explains it to “Good Buddy” (the name given to the CB radio pal voiced by Steve Buscemi), she is hoping to recapture some of her childlike wonder by spending time around actual children. But it doesn’t take long before Charlie understands why Good Buddy responded to her plan with a sardonic “good luck.” Her bullshit detector—softened to “bullshoot” around the tots—pings a lot around youngsters, who fib and fabricate freely.
So “Sloppy Joseph” turns into a standoff not just between Charlie and Stephanie but between Charlie’s idealism and the messy reality of children. It’s not hard for Charlie to figure out that Stephanie’s responsible for messing with Elijah’s trick. Once she learns about Stephanie’s slideshow, she can put the pieces of the plan together. Plus, Stephanie left a button from her uniform behind in J.B.’s janitor closet when she grabbed Elijah’s baby picture; and every time she smiles sweetly and says something unctuous, Charlie can tell she’s a phony.
Charlie’s real challenge comes in proving the case. The adults at the school are more than willing to believe that Stephanie’s responsible for Joseph’s death. (They’ve been around kids long enough to know Stephanie’s type.) But they’re all paid by rich parents, who see Stephanie as a super-bright, well-bred prodigy and Elijah as, well, the janitor’s son.
Charlie also underestimates Stephanie’s darkness. The child destroys evidence, insults her (“too bad they don’t give out gold stars for outsmarting the lunch lady”), and is unpersuaded by Charlie’s appeals to her humanity. In a sly bit of parody, Stephanie has what appears to be an Afterschool Special-style revelation about who she is and what she wants, giving a speech about the importance of friendship. Charlie’s response? “Bullshoot.”
Charlie finally does catch Stephanie by making the girl so mad she slips up. Charlie convinces the school to let Elijah return, then arranges it so that his classmates welcome him back with open arms—and extra gold stars. (“That’s socialism!” Stephanie screams.) Stephanie then tries to get J.B. fired by stealing from Dr. Hamm’s petty-cash box and putting the money in J.B.’s coveralls, only to find that Charlie is waiting with her own tablet, taking a picture.
The playful, child-sized spin on a murder mystery is fun, if a bit light on plot twists; and there’s some soulfulness to the way “Sloppy Joseph” digs into the root causes of Charlie’s rootlessness. (In short: She’s still looking for a way to be a responsible adult without losing her seeker’s heart.) But honestly, my favorite parts of this episode are less about the crime and punishment and more about the heightened emotions and casual surrealism of childhood itself.
Arkin and the Poker Face creative team keep finding funny ways to make an ordinary elementary school classroom look like an overheated fever dream: from the way Charlie cuts into an “RIP Joseph” cake and makes the gerbil illustration bleed jelly filling to how the classroom’s benignly informational bulletin board offers an inadvertently grim reminder of the “LIFE EXPECTANCY OF ANIMALS.”
The best bit though comes when Stephanie has to endure the “welcome back Elijah” party, which she experiences as a world turned upside-down, where everyone smiles and congratulates some loser while ignoring their star student. When a replacement Joseph is placed into the gerbil cage, it immediately begins rutting with the female, while Stephanie screams, “That’s not your gerbil husband!” As Stephanie flees this scene—made maximally absurd by Arkin & co.—she races through a much more normal-looking hallway, where a passing teacher dispassionately mutters, “No running please.”
That’s childhood in a nutshell. For the kids, every minute of every day is super-intense. And to the grown-ups, standing just out of frame? They just want everything to be quiet and calm until quitting time.
Stray observations
- • When I say Lyonne “gave the part” to Krumholtz, I should clarify that I actually don’t know if she was involved with that decision. Given that Lyonne is a producer on this show, I just assume she’s partly responsible for an old friend getting hired.
- • I give all the credit to the casting department though for finding these child actors. Halford and Vinson are both perfect in their parts. Halford is especially hilarious at faking sweetness.
- • Speaking of loyalty to old friends: Elijah and Stephanie’s teacher is played by Adrienne C. Moore, who worked with Lyonne on Orange Is The New Black.
- • This episode is filled with sickly dark humor. I let out a wicked cackle when Stephanie googled “how to murder a boy” (only to then finish that internet search with “’s self-esteem”).
- • Computer geek kid: “You shouldn’t say ‘a-s-s’ unless it’s a donkey in the Bible.” Charlie: “I’ll amend that behavior.”
- • I mentioned Wes Anderson as an influence, mainly because the montage of Stephanie’s many achievements looks like an homage to a similar sequence in Rushmore. I should add: the “honor pledge” Charlie has to sign reminded me of Dazed And Confused; Elijah muttering “never get out of the boat” is probably an Apocalypse Now quote; and Charlie’s insistence that “we’re gonna need a bigger boat” is absolutely a nod to Jaws. I mention all of this because if you haven’t seen the video that posted last week of the rapacious cinephile Natasha Lyonne absolutely raiding the Criterion closet, you must.