Clockwatchers (1997) opens with Iris (Toni Collette) arriving for a new temp job with a credit company. Almost immediately, Iris begins a friendship with the other temps (Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, and Alanna Ulbach) at the office. However, the arrival of a new permanent hire named Cleo (Helen Fitzgerald) sets in motion a series of events, including a number of thefts, that ultimately break apart the bonds of friendship between the four women.
Writer and director Jill Sprecher’s workplace comedy is everything that Office Space (1999) and Working Girl (1988) ought to have been. Clockwatchers charts with both nuance and compassion how friendships are formed and unmade in the cold, fluorescent plastic spaces of an office. Misogynist customs, machiavellian machinations, and paranoia are gradually revealed as Iris desperately tries to keep her friendships together. A subtle oppression is at work and functions as the antagonist of a story wherein the journey of the protagonist is simply one of survival.
Clockwatchers is as quietly tragic as it is overtly hilarious. Collette’s dry responses to the often comical turns of character actors Bob Balaban and Debra Jo Rupp as permanent employees is expertly executed in terms of both performance and editing to optimize the laughs. Likewise, Parker Posey delivers one of her most underrated and manic turns as the opinionated Margaret while Kudrow works a variation of her popular Phoebe character from Friends to great effect.
But, even with all of this talent in front of the cameras, Sprecher knows that the main character of the piece must be the physical space of the office itself. Wisely, Sprecher chooses to shoot through the windows of offices, the blinds on a cubicle and across busy lunch rooms to convey just how immersed in the space these women are. For most of Clockwatchers the temps don’t know it but they are prisoners in the workplace. To juxtapose the claustrophobia of these sequences Sprecher occasionally takes us outside and into the more intimate spheres of these women where two-shots and unobscured views prevail; conveying a subdued and undervalued sense of liberation.
Clockwatchers is a social critique disguised as a comedy. Generally speaking, the film is largely successful in doing all that Sprecher has set out to do. Unfortunately the ham-fisted voice over from the character Iris betrays this delicate balancing act by exposing the highly impactful subtext and rendering it as a kind of saccharine self-reflection. There is no stylistic or narrative motivation behind the use of the voice-over device so it feels like either coddling or condescension. Regrettably the voice-over in Clockwatchers reduces a superior film to one of mediocrity.
