Product: Office Space (1999)
Rating: 5.0
Get this movie ASAP, m'kay? Yeaaaah. Ter-rific.
If you survive a commute every morning that makes "Soylent Green" seem like a paradise, only to spend your life in a cubicle doing entirely meaningless work that becomes obsolete before it's even finished and has no effect at all on anyone's life -- which probably describes 4/5 of Americans, since there are very few jobs outside of corporate America anymore -- then this movie is for you. Mike Judge hits the bullseye on every aspect of cubicle life, and Ron Livingston, as protagonist Pete Gibbons, manages to say everything every cube-dweller wishes he or she could say: something that is real, not phoney; part of a meaningful life, not scripted, meaningless, business gibberish. Every character is instantly recognizable and perfectly drawn. The plot of the film is entirely beside the point; the characters and the situation would be hysterical no matter what the story was.My only complaint is that the movie, which, if left to run in its natural direction, would be fomenting revolution, wimps out in the end, turning into a trite commentary on the fact that "most people don't really like their jobs." But the film practically begs for a much bigger, more provocative, and more profound interpretation. It is a fierce commentary on the absurdity of modern life, but it ends up simply justifying the absurdity as existentially necessary and morally unproblematic. Yet the reduction of human lives to ballets of banal and empty formalisms is anything but morally unproblematic. But perhaps this kind of cowardice must simply be expected in modern films: "Traffic," a scathing commentary on the absurdity of the drug war, wraps everything up neatly by asking us to put our faith in the curative powers of 12-Step programs, sidestepping the moral questions surrounding the right of the government to wage war on citizens who take drugs, and simply accepting the "crime vs. disease" terms in which the debate is conventionally framed. Regardless of their implict meaning, it's probably unrealistic to expect Hollywood movies to end on a note that would make viewers think. The social function of these films, after all, is to make everyone return to their cubicles the next morning a bit less resentfully. Their economic function is to make a profit for the Bill Lumburghs of the world.Serial format video, like Judge's "Beavis and Butt-head," avoids these problems because it has no conclusion. "Office Space" probably would have benefitted if it, too, could have avoided a conclusion. Still, this one gets five stars because it's possible to disregard the last two minutes of the film and actually think about what it means. Also, it's funny as hell. And pay careful attention to Milton's mutterings.