Criterion in July 2021 brought back the 1997 office comedy Clockwatchers, an indie film that seemed largely forgotten, and I hadn’t seen it since my teens. It’s a comedy about four temps (Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach) who work in a boring corporate office, and it’s mostly about them bonding and feeling like outsiders, being seen as the “help” to the staff and talked to in patronizing or frustrating ways. The droning feeling of the work day is exemplified by a Muzak version of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” or being chided on how to staple documents.
When there’s a series of office robberies, the temps are scapegoated as the thieves, and are treated with suspicion, like grouping their desks together with cameras on them in an open office floor plan, not allowing them to socialize, and talking down to them with accusations like “Have any of you seen my scarf, you know, the one you were admiring earlier?”
Toni Collette, who was still working out her American accent at this time, is good as the mousy lead who is the entry point into this world, but Parker Posey was fantastic as the loudmouth firecracker who openly calls bullshit on being accused of being a thief, and is the spark that the boring office doesn’t know that they need. Lisa Kudrow and Alanna Ubach are also really good as the others who have lives outside of the office and aren’t as frustrated with their temp jobs as the others are. The movie can be light in parts, but it also gets more downbeat as the temps are picked on and they feel stuck with no real upward mobility anywhere else, as I could relate to in my work throughout my 20s.
I’m just happy this got dug up and put on streaming, it’s really a great movie that came out just a couple of years before Office Space, the cult comedy turned mainstream depiction of the dull monotony of corporate office life.
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