Antitrust

Antitrust

If one eye had been kept on the Goofy Meter, they might have made a nice little thriller out of “Antitrust.” Just when this movie is cooking, the needle tilts over into Too Goofy. What are we to make of a brainy nerd hero who fears his girlfriend is trying to kill him by adding sesame seeds to the Chinese food, and gives himself a quick allergy test at a romantic dinner by scratching himself with a fork and rubbing on some of the brown sauce? Too goofy.

The movie uses a thinly disguised fictional version of Bill Gates as its hero so thinly, I’m surprised they didn’t protect against libel by having the villain wear a name tag saying, ”Hi! I’m not Bill!” This billionaire software mogul, named Gary Winston, is played by Tim Robbins as a man of charm, power and paranoia. ”Anybody working in a garage can put us out of business,” he frets and he’s right. Cut to a garage occupied by Milo Hoffman (Ryan Phillippe) and his best buddy Teddy Chin (Yee Jee Tso), who are on the edge of a revolutionary communications breakthrough.

Winston’s company, which looks like Microsoft but has another name, is working toward the same goal. In fact, Winston claims his new Synapse global communications system will ”link every communications device on the planet.” Too goofy. To discourage competitors Winston has announced a release date for his new software while it is still being written (details like this are why the company looks like Microsoft).

He needs a software breakthrough, thinks Milo and Teddy can provide it; he invites them up for an interview at his company’s campus in the Pacific Northwest. Teddy declines: He hates the megacorp and believes code should be freely distributed; Milo accepts; before he leaves he is visited by an agent from the (pre-Bush) Justice Department (Richard Roundtree), who is preparing an antitrust case against Winston. ”If you see something up there that hits you the wrong way, do the right thing,” the agent says, offering Milo who stands on the brink of untold millions a salary much higher than you can earn at McDonald’s.

Milo takes the junket to the software campus and is shown around by cool young software dudes and a sexy software babe named Lisa (Rachael Leigh Cook), whose vibe suggests she likes him. Then he gets a tour of Winston’s palatial high-tech lakeside home, which even includes computers that sense when you’re in a room and play your favorite music while displaying your favorite art on the digital wall screens. ”Bill Gates has a system like this,” says Milo, just as we were thinking the exact same words. ”Bill who?” says Winston.

”His is primitive.” Milo decides to go to work for the megacorp, and is flattered by all the personal attention he gets from Winston, a friendly charmer who has a habit of dropping around even in the middle of the night. At one point when Milo is stuck, Winston hands him a disc with some code on it that ”might help,” just as a TV set in the background is reporting a news story about the death of a gifted software programmer. Hmmm.

Claire Forlani played Alice Poulson, Milo’s steady girlfriend from his garage days who smells a rat in Lisa. And sure enough, the little software vixen sinks her talons into Milo and begins seducing him away from Lisa although had he been any kind of nerd at all and seen a few thrillers between programming global communications systems that morning, he might have been able to guess her secret agenda as easily as we do.

There’s a moment in the movie you should savor, if you see it. Teddy keeps working back in the garage and has a breakthrough he sums up by saying, “It’s not in the box. It’s in the band.” Soon after that, Teddy is beaten senseless in what is made to look like a racist attack. That’s followed fairly quickly by Winston telling Milo: “It’s not in the box. It’s in the band.”

Milo has his delusions shattered when he realizes that Winston will kill for code and kill to eliminate competitors, which is something we had long since figured out but which comes as an earth shattering revelation to poor old Milo this much is clear because at this point the film goes into hyperdrive with its editing; there is a mad montage of jagged images, remembered dialogue, tilting cameras, echo-chamber effects everything except a woo-woo-woo alarm horn. Too goofy. In Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona,” when one character realizes that she wasn’t nice to the other one after all, the film itself appears to break. Here it’s like somebody threw a cherry bomb into the projector.

The movie then devolves into fairly conventional thriller material chases, deadly stalkings through dark interior spaces, desperate sesame-seed allergy tests until finally we are left with an argument against copyrighting software code because “human knowledge belongs to the world.” Stirring sentiments both; also unlikely that any free digital versions of this film will be posted on the Net in the immediate future.

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