Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/17/23

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, December 17, 2023

Clockwatchers (Jill Sprecher, 1997)

Parker Posey, Toni Collette, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ubach in Clockwatchers

Cast: 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. Screenplay: Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Production design: Pamela Marcotte. Film editing: Stephen Mirrione. Music: Mader.

Blessed are the meek, they say. Certainly Iris (Toni Collette) qualifies as meek when, on her first day as a temp at a credit company, she does as she's told and sits patiently for a very long time until Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp), the human resources manager, sees her and scolds her for not letting anyone know she was there. Self-effacing to a fault, Iris soon finds herself with a group of new friends, all temps who have been "temporary" for quite a while (a dodge companies use to keep from paying benefits). Each of them is more outgoing than Iris: Margaret (Parker Posey) is sassy and subversive, eager to point out to Iris ways to do as little work as possible. Paula (Lisa Kudrow) claims to be just passing time while waiting for her big break as an actress. Jane (Alanna Ubach) is engaged and can't wait until marriage frees her from office work. Iris's father (Paul Dooley), meanwhile, is urging her to get a good job in sales, something that her shyness makes her unsuitable for. This is the setup for Jill Sprecher's satire on contemporary work in the kind of office, scored to the artificial peppiness of Muzak, that anyone who ever worked for a corporation that values productivity over creativity, routine over initiative, and regimentation over individuality will recognize. In Clockwatchers, meekness wins out: Iris lasts longer in the job than her friends, even after the company makes their work lives more miserable than ever. But she's bested by an employee even meeker than she is, but who adds sneakiness to the meekness. As satire, I happen to think the film is a little too low key, and that the casting of vivid actresses like Posey and Kudrow, wonderful as they are, works against the mood of the film, but it has the ring of truth throughout.