Office Space (1999)

Review:

I feel like I have inhabited the world of "Office Space". I would like to say it was in large part an exaggeration of office life, but its not. It gave me chills as it made me laugh.

“Office Space” is Mike Judge’s opus to the banality of life inside a cubicle. The sanitary, grey universe of office space in which Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) must work is driving him crazy. He confesses to a hypno-psychiatrist that each day he spends at work is worse than the last day and so every day he is living through the worst day of his life. Every day Peter is bombarded with mundane questions like whether he got the memo about using a new cover sheet. If he seems down trodden his co-workers ask if he has a case of ‘the Mondays.’ Life for him is a living hell. Actually, a living purgatory may be more like it.

When visiting a hypno-psychiatrist, Peter is put into a trance and told to act without inhibitions. The psychiatrist conveniently dies of a heart attack while Peter is in the trance and thus a new Peter is born – one without the submission reflex, a man driven to act out. When asked to work on a Saturday, Peter decides to skip work. When he’s questioned by efficiency experts about what his job, he tells them he has no motivation and so only works fifteen minutes a week. When he goes fishing, he decides to gut the fish at his desk.

This onset of rebellious behavior leads Peter to ask out Joanna (Jennifer Aniston) the waitress he sees every day at a local restaurant. She agrees to a date and promptly becomes the romantic subplot of the movie.

Later, when Peter finds out two of his best friends at the company (David Herman as Michael and Ajay Naidu as Samir) are going to be laid off, they conspire to put a computer virus into the company’s system that would steal a few pennies each day. As one character notes, this is a crime lifted from “Superman III” and some guys from the 70s who got arrested.

The funniest part of “Office Space” is the first act when we are introduced to Peter’s prosaic existence and then his subsequent lashing out. Once the crime plot is revealed, I feel the movie loses some momentum. This could have been a comic tour de force if it hadn’t felt the need to introduce a plot. I would have liked “Office Space” better if instead of the crime scheme, we simply watched a story where Peter’s bad behavior in fact gave him promotion after promotion until he had some kind of inevitable fall.

But “Office Space” is funny enough. I liked it. I also really like Milton, the character who had his origins in Mike Judge’s SNL cartoons and inspired this film. Milton is a down trodden employee who never gets cake and keeps getting his cubicle moved. Ultimately, all he really wants is to keep his stapler. Its nice that he triumphs in the end. We all have a right to our stapler.

Rating:

On a scale of one to Casablanca, this film is a “Batman Returns”

Rationalization:

There is an inner rage in this film that is very compelling. When stripped away from its white-gray palette “Office Space” is as red as Milton’s stapler and angry as Milton’s disposition. I think “Office Space” has become such a hit because it speaks to two embedded (and opposing) desires in the American (if not the human) spirit: 1) to scream out to the universe that your existence matters 2) to be lazy. The inanity of office life does all it can to crush both those desires and it does it in the name of making more money. “Office Space,” presents a dystopia that we can believe in because we have seen it or lived in it. Thank God at least that we can sometimes laugh at it.