Going into Toshio Lee’s “Struggling Man,” whose title hero is a stressed supermarket worker, I imagined something in the line of “Supermarket Woman,” Juzo Itami’s 1996 comedy that knowingly dissects the ins and outs of the retail game. I should have known better. Lee, a veteran maker of commercial comedies including 2018’s “When I Get Home, My Wife Always Pretends to Be Dead,” may have taken a more serious, if sentimental, turn with his new film, but he once again delivers his usual brand of high volume, broad strokes humor. Itami-esque smart black comedy is not in Lee’s creative DNA.
That doesn’t mean he and scriptwriter Fumi Tsubota have brushed over the nuts and bolts of their protagonist’s business in adapting comedian Shiro Tsubuyaki’s novel of the same Japanese title for the screen. After 25 years of inching up the promotion ladder to assistant manager at Umeya Supermarket, Haruo Izawa (Ken Yasuda) knows how to turn a potential disaster — a subordinate’s botched order for 5,000 packages of sōmen noodles — into a triumph of canny marketing, with limited-time sales that makes products fly off shelves.
The store’s portly, good-natured manager calls him the store’s “pillar,” but when the manager suddenly dies of a stroke, Haruo isn’t promoted to take his place. Instead, the position goes to a nerdy accountant dispatched from headquarters who knows nothing about selling groceries beyond crunching numbers. That, I thought, sounds depressingly real enough.