Alain Resnais's Mon Oncle d'Amerique may be the funniest movie about the horrors of working since Charles Chaplin's Modern Times. I know this sounds strange, because Resnais's work never struck anyone as intentionally funny; his films have evoked, instead, a few giggles over the years for what has been alleged to be his failed seriousness or lame whimsy….

The invidious critical catchword "didactic" will probably haunt the film for a long time, particularly in the unusually risky passages in which the characters reenact some of their scenes with the heads of white rats superimposed on their bourgeois-clad bodies. A more felicitous supplementary strategy is to identify each of the characters with a role model from the galaxy of French movie stars….

[Failure] and disenchantment are very much the order of the day and night in [the film's] three interlocking stories…. Indeed, there are so many layers to the...