Corporate culture had been around for years when the ‘Office Hell’ genre arrived, and this sleek fable from cubicle-land is both one of the best and one of the least seen. The much abused office temps Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow and Alanna Ubach don’t have the luxury of cubicles, or even desks of their own. The comic tones develop into a deeper statement about workplace alienation, that stifles relationships and shatters one’s sense of free will. Even when it’s funny, Jill and Karen Sprecher’s perfectly-arranged look at office reality hits home hard. Everybody shines, and the remarkable Parker Posey runs away with top honors.

Clockwatchers
Blu-ray
Shout Studios
1997 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 96 min. / Street Date September 10, 2024 / Available from Shout Factory / 34.98
Starring: Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach, Helen FitzGerald, Stanley DeSantis, Jamie Kennedy, David James Elliott, Debra Jo Rupp, Kevin Cooney, Bob Balaban, Paul Dooley, Scott Mosenson, Irene Olga Lopez, Joshua Malina, O-Lan Jones, Joe Chrest, Patrice Pitman Quinn, Michelle Arthur.
Cinematography: Jim Denault
Production Designer: Pamela Marcotte
Costume Design: Edi Giguere
Film Editor: Stephen Mirrione
Original Music: Mader
Written by Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher
Executive Producers Guy Collins, John Quested
Produced by Gina Resnick, Jill Sprecher
Directed by Jill Sprecher

Forget the key ad art used on the cover of this disc that tries to sell Clockwatchers as a happy-happy 20-something relationship comedy.

The 1997 release is one of the first movies to peg the soul-crushing experience of corporate life at the entry level. Some UK TV shows may precede it, but the U.S. movie Office Space arrived two years later. Clockwatchers focuses on the toxic office culture endured by too many city dwellers. The corporate approach to enslaving managing employees pretty much killed off the spirit of America’s workplace. The official line is that employees are part of a family, but the loyalty and sense of responsibility only flows up, not down.

Before things changed, American entertainment kept up the illusion of Blondie- like office workplaces. 1980’s all-star comedy 9 to 5 was touted as liberating when new, yet was no more truthful than an episode of I Love Lucy: nice working women are comically disrespected, and the same nice working women exact a comic revenge against a clownish comic boss. Dolly Parton was cute, but that was about it. Clockwatchers takes a less forgiving attitude toward reality. It is also too realistic to be a comic satire. Its events are taken from the personal experiences of the director and co-writer, Jill and Karen Sprecher.

The only bond between the Sprechers’ four downtrodden heroines is their lowly status in the workplace hierarchy. They have little in common, and would probably not be friends outside the confines of ‘Global Credit.’ Iris, Margaret, Paula and Jane (Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow & Alanna Ubach) are temp employees not even given cubicles or their own desk. They have no benefits. The ‘real’ employees stay away, or ignore them. Cocky junior executives ask them for help and some try to date them after hours. But they don’t bother to learn their names.

The unfashionable, insecure Iris shows up for her first day and is immediately slighted by the office manager Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp), a paragon of insincere corporate manners. But three temp-work buddies are quick to bond with Iris, like survivors in a life raft. The liveliest wire among them is the smart-talking, gleefully mischievous Margaret. She counsels Iris in a quiet rebellion against the company, such as never taking phone messages and putting people on hold indefinitely. Behind Margaret’s conspiratorial smiles is an intelligent rage: she talks sedition but does she really mean it?  Margaret’s feeble plan to get somewhere is to be especially helpful to Mr. Lasky (Bob Balaban), a much-too-tightly wound mid-level executive who flies into a panic over the tiniest problem.

The tall blonde Paula is a beautiful neurotic. She commits minor sabotage on the copy machine, just to receive visits from the hunky guy who comes to repair it. Paula has also retreated into petty illusions — she makes up an imaginary ‘meaningful’ life outside of work, in which she goes to acting classes and auditions. Romance-wise, Jane would seem to be in the best shape, as she’s engaged to a guy who gives her a lot of gifts. When the other three temps see Jane’s beau in a car with another woman, they don’t know what to do — is it right to tell on him?  Despite her supposed future of bliss, Jane doesn’t seem at all happy.

Director Sprecher does wonders with the misery of office existence. The women do typing and run errands, but otherwise the only feedback they get is to not waste company property (“those paper forms are very expensive”). For much of the day the four might as well be ghosts. Margaret theorizes that they’re only there to be leveraged by the company accountants for tax purposes. Crisply shot sequences observe them going quietly mad while waiting for the clocks to announce lunchtime or the end of the day. The only time their existence is acknowledged is when one of them is late by 5 minutes. The remprimands are never direct. They’re delivered with a smile, in lawsuit-proof Corporatese: “I really hate to let people go.”

The setting of Clockwatchers was once a minor detail in older movies. The musical adaptation  How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying has two or three ‘secretaries’ montages, showing them grooming themselves, chewing bubble gum and checking each other out to see who is more attractive. It’s assumed that the male employees will harass them at every opportunity, and that doing so is funny. Most of the males in Clockwatchers are low-level execs on a rigid career course. The handsome fellow who asks the temp pool for aid is strictly smiles and good manners — but completely impersonal. Asking him for a recommendation draws a blank — he doesn’t remember the women from one minute to the next.

The Effects of Workplace Alienation.

The Sprecher sisters propose an office dynamic that seems absolutely true: the strange behaviors and possible personality disorders on view aren’t because ‘people are kooky,’ but are a symptom of the dehumanizing environment. Art (Stanley DeSantis) is in charge of office supplies, and hoards them like a madman. A request for a pencil is given major scrutiny. He’s such a neurotic that Margaret makes a point of tormenting him, as if his issues were a fetish. The insecure executive Mr. Lasky demonstrates that he can’t handle stress, any stress. At an execs’ meeting, he makes a huge fuss until a peer gives up a chair Lasky has decided is his. He repeatedly loses things before every meeting, and makes a scene to show the whole office that he’s doing something important.

Our four temps also show these psychological effects — the shy Iris actually blooms a bit in the company of new friends, but she becomes over-observant and suspicious of everything around her. Margaret’s frustration causes her to lose perspective and make a really bad decision. Jane just goes quiet and miserable, withdrawing into silence. Paula grows ever-more insecure, inventing more fantasies about her acting career. She may be shoplifting expensive beauty items.

Remember the Ray Bradbury / François Truffaut movie about a dysfunctional society,  Fahrenheit 451?  Julie Christie observes the people riding with her on a monorail. Several seem to be near-certifiable, playing with their hair or touching their faces. You put people in cages, they start to go nuts. The corporate working environment in Clockwatchers makes everyone neurotic, even our little group of temps.

At about the halfway mark the mood becomes more serious when the office is hit by a rash of petty office thefts, all personal items. Suspicion falls on the temps, which leads to camera surveillance, snap-searches and interrogations that presume their guilt. It’s too much for the quartet — Jane hunches over as if she’s trying to hide, Paula becomes emotional, and Margaret starts griping like a petty revolutionary. Margaret even asks her fellow temps to all stay away for a day without calling in, just to show their solidarity in protest.

The insightful aspect of Clockwatchers is that it shows our four beleaguered heroines picking up the same hateful behaviors of their tormentors. That trend begins when a quiet, mousy woman is hired as the CEO’s secretary, a permanent position. The temps immediately resent her, and start blaming her for their ills. The new secretary is even more isolated than the temps, and looks far more miserable. Misery does not promote honest fair play or mercy. Even Iris falls prey to her worst thoughts — she reads some clues wrong, and becomes convinced that Margaret is the petty sneak thief.

Curiously, several reviewers dissed Clockwatchers’ turn away from comedy, displeased by the Sprechers’ decision to take seriously the temps’ trial of alienation and paranoia. It’s as if they were expecting slapstick farce to take over, as in the 9 to 5 movie.

The movie ends in an all-too-real way. If there was a bond between the four, the mutual stress has erased it. In business today, a co-worker might leave in a flash and never be contacted again — why rehash dead issues?

All four actresses shine. The thoughtful characters in the Sprechers’ script must have been catnip for stars Toni Collette, Parker Posey and Lisa Kudrow, whose careers were already definitely in gear. Collette had broken through three years before with Muriel’s Wedding. Posey was already the darling of artsy independent features, her best previous showcase being  Party Girl (1995). And Lisa Kudrow chose Clockwatchers as a downtime project during her star-making TV show Friends.

Kudrow plays along with the ensemble’s even distribution of attention. Jill Sprecher gives her a scene to demonstrate Paula’s near-pathetic lack of self-knowledge. As if imagining what an acting class might be like, Paula mimes various emotions — happy, sad, etc. — in quick succession. It’s a replay of a famous gag by comedienne Marion Davies, from the silent movie Show People.  ↑

Toni Collette’s Iris narrates the movie from time to time. Iris is likable and endearing — we identify with her relationship with her loving father (Paul Dooley), a career salesman who expects her to forge ahead with a big business career. But the movie ends up firmly in the hands of Parker Posey, without stealing scenes. Her character has the most potential … although her fate maintains the story’s integrity, we leave Clockwatchers wishing there were a sequel, following Margaret’s further adventures in the big world.

Shout Studios’ Blu-ray of Clockwatchers is the fine encoding we’ve been hoping for. Finally seen in its proper widescreen ratio, we admire Jill Sprecher’s lively direction and the cinematography that never becomes dull, even in the forest of cubicles that is Global Credit. A number of compositons achieve an unforced Edward Hopper vibe. Bored women must pretend they are busy in an open-face office, and either shrink into quiet misery, or start showing their inner selves. Clockwatchers escaped us in earlier disc versions. We place it in the same ‘difficult to find’ category as Nancy Savoca’s fine film  Household Saints.

The clever soundtrack begins with the clicking of a clock. The composer Mader ( In the Soup) provides thoughtful interstitial themes, but the pervading backdrop audio in the offices of Global Credit is mind-numbing Muzak. Its presence is designed to increase productivity — or to make employees feel even more powerless, like rats in a maze.

The IMDB says the movie was filmed in Pasadena and Los Angeles, whereas we naturally think of New York City. Is the superior Clockwatchers considered some kind of failure?  Bios of Lisa Kudrow pay it little heed. Shout!’s plain-wrap disc has no extras whatsoever. That’s okay — when one has a favorite movie, sometimes it’s better not to know.

A good film-fan comparison for Clockwatchers might be the glossy 1959 soap  The Best of Everything. That movie’s setup is the same, yet completely different. Its coterie of young hopefuls (Hope Lange, Suzy Parker, and Diane Baker) go to work for a publishing house, a hotbed of business rivalries and predatory males. One young woman has flaky notions of becoming an actress, and all three are pursued by selfish men. But even though they slave away in an open-plan office, the new employees aren’t ‘temps.’  They are given opportunities to show what they can do, and good work gets noticed. If one can get past the grabby men and various execs with chips on their shoulders (Joan Crawford!), there’s a fair chance to survive and succeed. (I like my old review too, give it a look.)

The lesson of Clockwatchers is that the corporate setup can be pretty brutal. I’m told that the film is accurate, except that working conditions for temps are often much better.Hopefully not every company is ‘Global Credit,’ populated by Pod People like the office manager Barbara and the office supplies manager Art. Who would want to work at such an abusive place?  How many have no choice?

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Clockwatchers
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: none.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: September 27, 2024
(7198cloc)

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