Review: Clockwatchers (1997)
Recently, about 2PM, I had this choice: I could continue watching the Yankee game — it was about the 4th inning, the Yankees had scored a couple of runs, Cone was pitching well, but I wasn’t paying that much attention — or I could also see a movie.
I was thinking of seeing “Deep Impact”, mainly to see the big tidal wave (I had noted the wave didn’t seem to go much past, say, Fulton Street, so I thought the Upper West Side would remain dry, but, really, I had to confirm this), but with mixed reviews, I wasn’t sure if I was up to seeing a couple hours of people being reconciled with their family members and working out various personal issues before the comet hits.
[I actually am not sure how the movie ends, if the big comet hits or not. I think it’d be funny if it didn’t hit, but no one told the folks living in the big cave. The could emerge two years later to find a Walmart next to the entrance. Laughter would ensue.]
So, skipping over “Deep Impact”, I sat down down and watched “Clockwatchers”, one of those low-budget indies (it has to be since Parker Posey is in it; before I’d use Steve Buscemi as the litmus test appears, but now that he’s appeared in the other big comet/meteor movie, “Armageddon”, this assay method is now in doubt). This is a neat film, very fun, especially in the first hour or so. Basically, it’s the story of four 20-something temps working in a depressing office.
The central character is Iris starts off the movie as a shy observer, watching her fellow temps go about trying to kill time, meet men, etc. In many cases, they’re just going through life’s motions: one of them is getting married to someone who apparently just gives her expensive gifts, a second claims to be an actress, though nothing apparently comes from her auditions, and the third is there trying to get a permanent job. This third one, played by Parker Posey, verbalizes the existential doubts they all seem to have: as a temp, they can vanish and no one would notice or care. Her quest for a permanent job, or at very least a recommendation, is her desire to leave a mark in the world.
Things take a darker turn when the job she’d been gunning for, executive assistant, is given to a mousy new hire. At the same time, someone starts stealing things from the office — paperweights, books, the personal effects people have to decorate their cubicles, a very special ball of rubberbands — and suspicion falls automatically on the temps. As pressure mounts on them, as they’re put under more careful scrutiny, the work friendships they had formed shows cracks.
I don’t find the film to be, say, a critique of the modern American workplace, though it shows a lot of the absurd little things that happen in offices. It’s not Dilbert. Rather, the idea of people existing in a void, unconnected in any meaningful way and going through the motions of life, is its main theme, and the vagaries and darknesses of the modern American workplace is simply the most opportune setting for this existential limbo. The office is where people look for deep connections in this significant social space and fail to find it; for this film the particulars of unconnectedness are distilled into these temps.
Anyway, “Clockwatchers” is a good movie, very funny in parts. Currently, it’s on one of the cable movie channels this month.
Later, I turned on CNN, and notice that the Yankees had won. I suppose it was a good game.