Mike Judge’s workplace comedy gets petty management painfully right, with Ron Livingston, Gary Cole and Stephen Root doing precise comic work. The story weakens towards the end, but the jokes are worth an evening.
Office Space is a funny, closely observed workplace comedy whose ordinary final third cannot quite undo the pleasure of its complaints. Mike Judge, who writes and directs, understands how repeated requests for something trivial can occupy more of a day than the work anyone was hired to do. The recurring demands for cover sheets give him exactly the right scale. At 90 minutes, the film has enough room to repeat the nuisance until we understand why the staff are angry.
Gary Cole’s Bill Lumbergh is the central achievement, a middle-management boss whose passive aggression makes every request feel difficult to refuse. Cole makes managerial interference seem routine, which is what makes it so unpleasant. We laughed at the repeated demands for cover sheets, then felt irritated on the employees’ behalf. Judge knows that being asked again can be worse than being told off, particularly when the request implies that the fault must be ours.
Ron Livingston gives Peter enough weariness to make his frustration credible, and enough comic restraint to keep him agreeable. David Herman’s Michael Bolton and Ajay Naidu’s Samir help Judge establish an office in which frustration is shared without making everyone interchangeable. Stephen Root’s Milton is especially good, a performance whose oddness never quite conceals how badly this man fits the organisation around him. These are slight character sketches, but the actors make them distinct enough for the jokes to belong to particular people.
Edward T. McAvoy’s production design makes the cubicle office feel like somewhere people could spend years without becoming comfortable. Tim Suhrstedt’s cinematography is appropriately unshowy, keeping those surroundings ordinary enough for the employees’ frustration to remain the point of a scene. Making the workplace more grotesque would have weakened the recognition on which the comedy depends. The lack of visual excitement is useful here, leaving us to notice how much fuss is being made about so little.
David Rennie’s editing is most effective in the recurring workplace irritations, where repetition has a comic purpose. A brisker rhythm might have delivered the information and lost the annoyance, which is half the joke. John Frizzell’s score makes less of an impression than the rap soundtrack, whose force suits the employees’ frustration. The contrast between that music and the office’s petty demands is funny without needing an extra gag.
The final third is the weakness, because Judge’s plotting grows more conventional just when his observation has earned our confidence. The film becomes less interesting when workplace details stop supplying the comedy, and the romantic strand is not as sharp as the office satire. Workplace comedies need recognisable frustrations, and Judge is much surer of those than he is of how to develop a story from them.
The consensus is much less favourable than we are, and its complaints about the flimsy plot have some force. We disagree with the dismissal of the jokes: the cover-sheet routine earns its repetition because each request makes the same small indignity harder to tolerate. The actors also give these slight parts more life than that verdict allows. Worth an evening, provided a comedy about a miserable job does not sound too much like bringing work home.
