Clockwatchers (1998)
Director: Jill Sprecher

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In Clockwatchers Iris (Toni Collette), a dumpy, shy girl still living at home, joins a pool of temporary secretaries in a big, impersonal New York firm called Global Credit. The other three temps, Margaret (Parker Posey), Paula (Lisa Kudrow), and Jane (Alanna Ubach), hate the job but resent not being taken on as permanent staff. (They've worked there for months but management hasn't even learned their names.) Quite different from each other, the three are bonded in their professional limbo and take Iris in. Margaret, the flamboyant attitude leader among them, is entrusted with showing Iris the low-slung ropes: "The only real challenge of this job is trying to look busy when there's nothing to do.

The director Jill Sprecher, who co-wrote the script with her sister Karen Sprecher, dramatizes temporary secretarial work as a sink of boredom and paranoia. Every workday is an airless stretch of tedium, although the company's busy, and still a temp often finds she can't quite meet the demands. The movie is clever about how people divert themselves at work as the coals in their brains ash over: riding their chairs, painting their nail tips with white-out, writing with an interlocked wand of colored magic markers. GCA is the kind of hell where the minute hand of the clock ticks backward for a minisecond before advancing and the Sprechers manage to get the full comic atmosphere of life spent in a place so dull that it actually seems possible time might lose its forward propulsion.

However, they didn't figure out how to turn this atmosphere into a story. The temps are second-class citizens in the corporation, ostracized at lunch and sneered at by the company secretaries, passed over for permanent positions but refused the recommendations they'd need to get full-time jobs somewhere else. There's some basis in social complaint here: from Wal-Mart to the Ivy League, corporations are hiring more part-time, temporary, and adjunct workers. But though Clockwatchers gestures toward this critique, the story doesn't really follow it out. Instead, when things start disappearing from desks and offices and the cloakroom (everything from pencils to the big, gold "C" of the company logo over the reception desk), attention is focused on the four temps. Their oppression, which in small doses had bound them together, now makes them paranoid and tears them apart. That is, the story ventures into Kafkaesque territory briefly when the four women assert their innocence in the face of increasingly hostile surveillance--their desks are moved to an open area scanned by video cameras--and then begins to take the drama of the collapse of friendship seriously.

It's a mistake, but one I suppose you could see coming from the start, because the main character is awkward Iris who in voice-over narration "sensitively" muses over her experiences in her notebook. The Sprechers have solid comic instincts and timing (for instance, Iris's first task involves typing information onto forms which she's told are very expensive; it takes her four slow keystrokes to make a mistake, twice in a row), but they don't trust them enough. Iris doesn't get any more funny business, but rather voice-overs of this nature--"That night I thought about the missing items at work, how every object has its own story, like a seashell or a notebook. What seems ordinary to one person is another's treasure." (Is "thought" the right word here?)--and a self-discovery plotline.

With Iris's narration the picture tries to make a leap into existential ponderings of insignificance (which do not have feminist overtones, at least) and it just can't do it. Nor does the drama have much emotional impact, when, for instance, Iris laments her "betrayal" of Margaret, who is naturally scapegoated for the thefts. It's hard to get worked up about Iris's inaction while Margaret is hustled out by security seeing as the entire premise of the movie is that the job isn't worth having, and half the jokes in the first part of the movie depend on Margaret's flippant assertion of her inability to perform the minimum functions, such as typing.

In fact, one of the strengths of the movie is how clearly it sees Margaret as a girl all but begging to be crushed by authority. (She's warned of it by a medium the girls go to one night after happy hour. This isn't a supernatural strand; it wouldn't take ESP, certainly not for a practiced conwoman like Madame Debbie (O-lan Jones), to see it coming to Margaret.) Parker Posey is dazzling at the objectless defiance of a girl with plenty of personality, energy, and brains, but no productive outlet. Margaret is the self-destructive type who confuses parodying the awfulness of her situation with beating it. And when she does get mad she calls on the other three to stage a one-day walk-out to show the company how dependent they are on them. She's the only one with the guts to actually stay out, and you can believe that despite her awareness of the faceless efficiency of the company, and of her own incompetence, she'd imagine that temp workers, of all people, could win a wildcat. Margaret is the kind of thrilling rebel who raises morale among co-workers by walking up to and over the cliff while they watch from a safe distance.

Posey has a fabulous gift for ambiguous mimicry. When a man at the happy hour buffet warns her that the chicken wings are spicy she does a take-off on flirty female helplessness that makes you cringe for the guy as you laugh. Posey can turn her half-a-saucer smile into a parody of feminine complaisance seemingly at the flip of a switch located somewhere behind her eyes. (It also helps that her smile sits between dimples as big as parentheses; they add to the ambiguity of her beaming expression.) And her nicotine-tinged mezzo can imitate any conventional style of address--secretary answering phone, tour guide. She even turns it on Iris, thanking her for her feeble moral support in advance of Margaret's dinner with her parents. By giving her voice more contours when she's sarcastic, and making it relatively flat otherwise, Posey brings comic flex to Margaret's self-defeating low expectations.

Altogether, being an indie queen lets Posey be more imaginative with her entire petite frame and loose-jointed limbs. She's probably the most stylish female smoker in movies in decades and can casually gesture to a crazy woman accosting people on the sidewalk and say, "That's me in a couple of years," without losing her nonchalant glamor. At the same time, she adopts a purposefully uncoordinated walk in the halls of Global Credit, as if grace would be too much of a concession to the firm. And the way she responds to a memo forbidding personal calls at work, tearing it to shreds over her head while scooting around on her chair, indicates that as an actress she has access to a child's sense of physical freedom.

Posey is probably the most potent comedienne in our movies right now. She uses her facility at acting almost impersonally, which gives Margaret of touch of Scarlett O'Hara--she's frustrated with and even bored by the wiles that she has such skill at. Posey has, in fact, Bill Murray's ability to sustain total put-on, but unlike Murray at her age she's able to suggest some of the desperation and disgust that motivates it. Posey isn't up to Bill Murray in his peak performances in Scrooged and Groundhog Day, but she's young. A rosy-skinned brunette, her face foxily alert and self-protecting, she's really young and beautiful to have become the funniest specialist of unrelenting comic insolence in current movies (way ahead of Janeane Garofalo, whose best moments so far have been in Paul Schrader's too-little-seen Touch). As Margaret she functions in that classic movie way as both an incitement to recklessness and a warning of the consequences. But the other boon of being a star of independent movies is that she never has to become "nice." Remember what they did to Ally Sheedy at the end of The Breakfast Club? Parker Posey never has to say she's sorry.

Although the Sprechers made the predictable mistake of putting Iris at the center instead of Margaret (Iris, who's so shut-down that when her father talks her into applying for a sales position with his company she folds the application letter up and hides it, and then when she finally sends it and gets a rejection she folds that up and hides it), Margaret is a better part than Posey's starring role as Mary in Party Girl (1995). In the very beginning of Party Girl she's good at being both an irresponsible downtown hedonist and a girl who's an order freak about her style: Mary not only keeps her assortment of jeans on hangers, she alphabetizes them on the rack. It makes Mary's quirkiness more genuinely quirky (necessary in a movie that gambles everything on your finding the party girl cool) and prepares for the ironic turnaround of the plot when she takes a job from her disgusted guardian, a librarian, and finds fulfillment as an initiate of recondite systematization.

The director of Party Girl, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, doesn't have the touch that makes scenes of farce work. At the climax, especially, you see a lot of people shouting at each other and feel no impulse to laugh. And there's a basic inconsequentiality to the material and treatment that doesn't match the darker, all-dressed-up-and-going-nowhere club scene. The only surprise is that blending That Girl and "downtown" makes a surprisingly ordinary shade of girlie pink. The movie is good only when Posey is living in the moment, dancing around her loft apartment with friends (the life of the preparation for the party) but with her face tugged down by a growing disrelish for her life, or when she's talking tough to her guardian with barely disguised sarcasm even though her back is to the wall. The party girl is saved but the director doesn't have the hand to whip up the fluff.

The movies that have given Posey her best roles have this in common: they dote on her. She has to be the camera's special girl, in some ways like an old Hollywood star, though she's so exhilarating because of the way in which she violates proprieties. She's got the bitchiness of a siren in a '40s picture (her put-on has the pouty posing of a come-on), but we're meant to feel that she's out there for part of us, too. Putting the world on for reasons both justified and unjustified she's an anti-social clown in a new guise, the girl hipster. Clockwatchers is her best role because we love Margaret for going over the cliff. She's the wittiest embodiment of loser's heroism in her generation.

You have to acknowledge that Margaret is an anti-heroine for adolescents, that is, for people who think they deserve better because of who they are not because of what they've disciplined themselves to do. Fortunately the movie doesn't see her as out-and-out heroic, but offers an adult's take on an adolescent personality. You see it in the after-work swingles bar when Margaret burns everybody's bridges with a sleazy guy who gave Paula his card. The movie doesn't sink to a melodramatic comeuppance for the guy so you see that Margaret's gesture can't offer anything but momentary release, if that.

To be fair to the Sprechers, it would be difficult to come up with a four-person story centered on Margaret, because she'd blind us to the other characters. In any case, Jill Sprecher doesn't appear ready for that kind of challenge. Usually moviemakers who try to touch us with characters like Iris aren't as good at comedy as the Sprechers are at their best. They need to trust their gift for comedy more. (This is not, however, what they did do in their follow-up picture 13 Conversations About One Thing. In it the potential comedy is about as stifled as it could be in a movie that still registers as irony.) The Sprechers brought us Posey's Margaret and for that I thank them. But by sticking with nearly mute, poetic-pathetic Iris and letting Margaret go they're like fishermen who throw the trout back and eat the bait. If independent women moviemakers don't know what to do with their most interesting, challenging funny girls, is there any hope for these actresses to have the careers they deserve?