Big Nothing

Director Jean-Baptiste Andrea's wicked, jet-black comic thriller Big Nothing stars Friends mainstay David Schwimmer as Charlie Wood, a onetime American professor now married to a policewoman, Penelope (Natascha McElhone) and living in Oregon. As the story opens, Charlie takes a job as a telephone operator at an Information Technology call support center, but is promptly fired for making offensive comments to a customer. One of Charlie's shadier co-workers, Gus Dickinson (Simon Pegg) wheedles him into his plan to blackmail a priest, Rev. Smalls (Mitchell Mullen) by using "inside" information from the company that demonstrates the minister's obsession with internet porn. Thus begins an endless series of Mametian twists and turns involving double-cross, mistaken identity, forced drownings, poisonings, infidelities and cold-blooded mariticide, as the men attempt to collect on the money but run head-first into one outrageous conflict after another. Alice Eve, Mimi Rogers and Jon Polito co-star; Andrea and William Asher co-authored the script.