From the March 23, 2001 issue of the New York Times:

By A. O. SCOTT

When Herman Melville finished "Moby-Dick" in 1841, he was a literary celebrity. When he died half a century later, he was completely forgotten, and the works we have come to think of as his greatest ("Billy Budd," "The Confidence Man," "The Piazza Tales" and "Moby-Dick" itself) languished in oblivion. It seems likely that Melville was ignored in his own time because he was so far ahead of it.

It took the rise of psychoanalysis and literary modernism to crack the code on "Moby-Dick" and "Pierre, or the Ambiguities." And, similarly, the advent of modern office culture -- the anomie of the open cubicle, the canned camaraderie of the water cooler -- has at last made it possible to appreciate fully "Bartleby the Scrivener," his enigmatic 1856 "tale of Wall Street." To read this story now is to recognize Melville as the forefather of Kafka, and also of "Dilbert." In the last year or so, there has been a mini-boom in imaginative Melville film adaptations: Claire Denis's "Beau Travail" (based on "Billy Budd"); Leos Carax's "Pola X," a fevered rendering of "Pierre"; and now Jonathan Parker's quirky, sure-footed "Bartleby" (one of "The Piazza Tales"), showing tonight and tomorrow in the New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art, with the ethereally pallid Crispin Glover in the title role. Mr. Parker, who wrote the script with Catherine di Napoli, has transported Me.

The film's narrator, identified only as the Boss and played by the deadpan, baggy-eyed David Paymer, occupies a shabby ground floor office in one of these anonymous buildings. His firm handles municipal public records, and he hires Bartleby, a former employee in the postal service's dead-letter office, to help with the filing, verification of claims and whatever else it is the company does. Bartleby's co-workers are the flashy-dressing wiseguy wannabe Rocky (Joe Piscopo), the slovenly Ernie (Maury Chaykin) and the sex-kittenish, alliteration-prone office manager, Vivian (Glenne Headly).

Mr. Parker has brilliantly updated his source and grasped its essence, composing a sorrowful and hilarious tone poem about alienated labor, or an absurdist workplace sitcom, as if a team of French surrealists had been put in charge of "The Drew Carey Show." The filmmakers have sprinkled some saving morsels of farce amid the literary gloom, like Vivian's attempted seduction of the city manager (Seymour Cassel) and Ernie's unfortunate encounter with a toner cartridge. And the cast, which also includes Carrie Snodgress and the television comedy legend Dick Martin (of "Laugh-In" fame), gives even the film's downbeat moments an undercurrent of loose humor.

The production designer, Rosario Provenza, has decorated the Boss's offices according to a color scheme that might be called understated putrescence: various shades of mustard, brown and avocado clash throbbingly under the fluorescent lights, matched by the Boss's taste for plaid sport jackets and Vivian's lurid ensembles. Mr. Glover, in his shapeless slate-gray suit and lank, shiny hair, looks like a superimposed black-and-white phantom, and his face has an uncanny stillness amid the genial buffoonery of Ernie, Rocky and Vivian. And his signature phrase ("I would prefer not to") becomes a whispered cry of resistance.

His refusal -- first to work, then to be fired, then to do anything but stand looking at a dusty air-conditioner vent -- is at once suicidal and heroic, completely irrational and perfectly understandable. Who of us, confronted with the daily absurdity of work, has not felt the urge to say no, to do nothing at all rather than submit to the senseless regime of petty somethings the world demands of us? (What's that, boss? Oh no, I was just speaking hypothetically. Yes, right away, sir.)

Bartleby, of course, is a cipher, a smudged allegorical figure in a drably familiar landscape. The emotional center of the story is the Boss, whose plaintive cry "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" is, in the story, almost as mysterious as Bartleby himself. In Mr. Parker's version, Bartleby's spooky strangeness, effortlessly embodied by Mr. Glover, contrasts with Mr. Paymer's dogged, decent ordinariness. He's only human, just trying to do his job, to be reasonable and fair. And -- with the exception of a too obvious, tacked-on coda -- Mr. Parker has done his job beautifully, using the literature of the past to make the present look as strange as it really is.

Itamar Kubovy does something similar in "Upheaval," a short film based on a Chekhov story that is being shown with "Bartleby" in a perfect double bill. Chekhov's 19th-century Russian gentlefolk, with their servant troubles and their troubled marriages, are seamlessly transformed into an upscale Manhattan couple (Frances McDormand and David Chandler) trying to give an overelaborate birthday party for their young son. Only 14 minutes long, "Upheaval" is a stingingly comprehensive study in class arrogance and marital miscommunication.

BARTLEBY

Produced and directed by Jonathan Parker; written by Mr. Parker and Catherine di Napoli, based on the novella by Herman Melville; director of photography, Wah Ho Chan; edited by Rick LeCompte; music by Mr. Parker and Seth Asarnow; production designer, Rosario Provenza; a production of Parker Film Company. Running time: 82 minutes. This film is not rated. Shown with a 14-minute short, Itamar Kubovy's "Upheaval," today at 6 and 6:30 p.m., tomorrow at 3 p.m. at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan, as part of the 30th New Directors/New Films series of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the department of film of the Museum of Modern Art.

WITH: David Paymer (The Boss/Narrator), Crispin Glover (Bartleby), Glenne Headly (Vivian), Joe Piscopo (Rocky), Maury Chaykin (Ernie), Seymour Cassel (Frank Waxman), Carrie Snodgress (Book Publisher) and Dick Martin (Mayor).