Bartleby

While Parker and co-writer Catherine di Napoli are faithful to Melville’s plotline, they and a fully engaged supporting cast — have made the old boy's characters more quick-witted than any English Lit major would have thought possible.

This is a shrewd and effective film from a director who understands how to create and sustain a mood.

Although closer in tone to "Office Space" than Herman Melville, Jonathan Parker's absurdist update of Bartleby is surprisingly faithful to the spirit, if not the letter, of the "Moby-Dick" author's 1853 novella about an under-achieving Wall Street copy clerk.

A fable that leaves us unenlightened at the end, it is a curious, worthy failure.

It's not a bad idea, and it has the right cast and the right look. But, sad to say, it lacks the pace and energy to make it come alive and therefore remains more of a literary conceit than a movie.

Parker's film is flat beyond the flatness appropriate to the story; the conflict between Glover and Paymer follows Melville's original so squarely that it quickly begins to feel like they're going through the motions.

The loud, musty production design -- steeped in lime greens and tangerine oranges -- smells of recirculated air and enervated ambition, but unfortunately, so does the movie itself.