The first time I saw some very online person smugly trot out the line “I do not dream of labor” in response to an anodyne prompt about dream jobs, my eyes rolled reflexively to the back of my head. No one dreams of the labor part, I remember thinking. It’s supposed to be a question about your interests, your priorities, your contributions as you see them in the world.
But as I watched Netflix’s Office Romance, in which two colleagues woo each other with lines like, “For most people, work is something you have to endure to get to the weekend. But for me, this is the best part,” I found that retort bubbling up in my head again, this time in my own voice. I do not dream of labor. But these people really, really do, to an extent that gives what ought to be a fluffy Jennifer Lopez rom-com vehicle a faintly dispiriting feel.
Office Romance
The Bottom Line
Not worth running afoul of HR for.
Release date: Friday, June 5 (Netflix)
Cast: Jennifer Lopez, Brett Goldstein, Betty Gilpin, Jodie Whittaker, Tony Hale, Bradley Whitford, Edward James Olmos, Mary Wiseman, Amy Sedaris, Rick Hoffman
Director: Ol Parker
Screenwriters: Brett Goldstein, Joe Kelly
Rated R,
1 hour 50 minutes
To be fair, a shared enthusiasm for 80-hour weeks isn’t the only thing that unites Jackie (Lopez), the CEO of wildly successful New Jersey-based commercial airline Air Cruz, and her in-house counsel, Daniel (Brett Goldstein, who co-wrote the script with Joe Kelly). The other thing is that they’re both really, really, ridiculously good-looking — so much so that he pops a very obvious boner after the first time they shake hands, to his deep mortification and her flattered amusement.
This spontaneous and uncontrollable expression of lust appears to stem from the fact that neither of them have gotten laid in years, owing to the whole “always at work” thing. Daniel is so allergic to making friends even at the office that he’d rather lecture a coworker (Mary Wiseman) at length about how the British greeting “Alright?” is not an invitation to open up than deign to make small talk with her. As for Jackie, Office Romance tries incoherently to have it both ways, portraying her as simultaneously a Miranda Priestly-level ice queen who’ll cut down an employee for breathing too loudly and a totally down-to-earth gal who’s just misunderstood.
In any case, Jackie’s only friend is her very pregnant assistant Sydney (Betty Gilpin), who loves her job so much she plans to keep working right up until the moment her water breaks, and then clock right back in the next morning. Her distaste for Daniel seems rooted in her sense that he’s keeping Jackie from being her most workaholic self, which would be kind of sad if Gilpin didn’t make such a hilariously juicy meal of glaring daggers at Goldstein.
Indeed, Gilpin emerges the jewel of a sincerely funny supporting cast, followed closely by an unrecognizable Jodie Whittaker as Daniel’s charmingly brash sister Lizzy, who’s serving a life sentence for murder(!). More sparingly used but still noteworthy are Bradley Whitford as a bilious attorney with a passion for breakfast burritos and Tony Hale as a beleaguered HR manager who would really like everyone to stop asking about the company’s zero-tolerance dating policy. Especially with Ol Parker, director of the silly and joyful Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, at the helm, it’s easy to envision the much funnier ensemble comedy Office Romance could have been.
Instead, those hijinks are increasingly sidelined by the attraction between Daniel and Jackie, which is supposedly so irresistible that both are willing to jeopardize their careers for it. (Jackie, who’s been falsely accused of sleeping with her business partners, stands to lose control of her family’s airline; Daniel fears he’ll be disbarred). In theory, this should be wildly romantic: Here are two people who never thought they could love anything more than corporate board meetings, discovering there’s more to life than spreadsheets and slide decks!
In practice, the results are underwhelming. Daniel and Jackie’s courtship has its fun moments, including their first dance to a tropical cover of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” and the surprise reveal of Jackie’s obsessive Anglophilia (“I’m your kink,” he teases her). And it never hurts that as a licensed pilot with her own tiny plane, Jackie is able to whisk them off to remote paradises at a moment’s notice. But despite both actors’ strained efforts to come across as bright and adorable, their chemistry rarely surpasses “friendly coworkers who collaborate well on group projects” — much less reaches the heights of “star-crossed lovers” or “soulmates.”
Perhaps aware of this lack, the film leaves most of Jackie and Daniel’s physical connection to our imagination. The characters might talk a big game about how they’ve been shagging non-stop, or even how messy it gets when certain bodily fluids spill onto hair. But what we actually see is rather chaste. The first time they sleep together, they’ve barely stumbled into the bedroom before the movie cuts to them waking up the next morning. While not every grown-up romance needs to be sexually explicit, this stiff restraint sits at odds with a script that often seems to be reaching for Apatovian raunch.
Regardless of whether we believe in Jackie and Daniel’s connection, the script dictates that they do — and so, after the pro forma third-act crisis, it all comes to a head with a grand romantic gesture. But here, too, we’re reminded that the truest romance Office Romance knows is with the office. In this universe, “I love you” is followed immediately by “I want to work with you,” and then some unearned blather about how when you really think about it, your employees are like your family. For some, I guess, that could qualify as a happy ending. Myself, I’d rather go back to not dreaming of labor.
