Clockwatchers . Nashville Scene . 08-03-98

Clockwatchers

DIRECTED BY: Jill Sprecher

REVIEWED: 08-03-98

Thanks to the proliferation of wage slaves-turned-indie filmmakers, we're getting more movies than ever about lousy jobs. Clockwatchers, director Jill Sprechen's dark-humored comedy-drama, surveys the thankless lot of four corporate temps, who are alternately ignored, oppressed, and persecuted by the "permanents" at amorphous Global Credit. Here, as in The Spanish Prisoner and In the Company of Men, the workplace is a minefield of bureaucratic menace, and workers eye their colleagues with suspicion all the while doing as little actual work as possible.

There are no slackers in the cast, though. Lisa Kudrow adds pathos to her patented ditz routine, and Parker Posey spits out tart-tongued lines like bites of poisoned apple. As director, Sprechen has a keen sense of how staffers seize upon petty internal squabbles to alleviate tedium. When a day gig is this dull, the theft of office supplies becomes high drama.

But the script, which she cowrote with her sister Karen, is a mopey mix of sitcom, satire, and soap opera. Worse, Sprechen falls back on two all-too-common indie conventions self-conscious, unnecessary narration and facetious cartoon expressionism that are dead giveaways a director doesn't know what she's doing. (The narration in particular throws a soggy blanket over the movie.) Still, whenever chirpy Muzak wafts through the speakers, or when a supply manager throws a fit about doling out an extra pen, any office drudge past or present is bound to flinch.

--Jim Ridley

Capsule Reviews
Clockwatchers
Clockwatchers
Clockwatchers

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