Corner Office (2022)
How to succeed in alienating absolutely everyone
Corner Office (2022)
Directed by Joachim Back
A beefed-up Jon Hamm, still on his doomed quest for a film part that would deliver the promise made in his breakout role in TV’s Mad Men — by this point he seems more like the equivalent of a one-hit wonder — returns to familiar scenes, if not to form, in a pandemic comedy, “Corner Office.”
Hamm plays Orson, a very odd, uncomfortable adult for whom the term neurodivergent could apply. He’s scrupulous and naïve while simultaneously thinking he’s smarter than everyone else. At first there’s no evidence he’s wrong. The office to which he reports for his first day is hellish. The other people in his department look askance at each other as much as at their new coworker; they all seem to be hiding something from each other and the world (though the movie happens entirely in the office itself and the closest we get to “the world” is the vast, snow-covered parking lot). Their chief strategy if spoken to is simply to ignore not only the statement but the person who opened their mouth. It’s Kafka by way of Tao Lin.
But Orson finds relief in a secret, well-furnished executive office on his floor. Located between the elevators and the bathroom, it’s Vice President-sized and appears to have been tastefully furnished for someone who subscribed to Esquire magazine circa 1964.
When he’s in this room — known as “the Room” to Orson and to his puzzled co-workers — having escaped the conspiratorial whispers and disapproving sneers of his fellow employees, he’s not the cringing drone we see him to be, but brilliant at business English. Pleased at his newfound access to this latent ability, Orson begins swiping his co-workers’assignments off their desks, repairing to his secret Room, and rewriting them such that their clarity captures the attention of an Executive Vice President. (This worthy is never named or seen; his thoughts and wishes are delivered solely through Orson’s manager, Andrew [Christopher Heyerdahl] — himself perhaps the only person alive who still speaks using a mid-Atlantic accent — and only after a near-genuflection and upward cast of the eyes.)
There’s just one problem: no one else acknowledges the existence of the Room; they can’t even see the door that Orson can open and enter. To the others, when he’s in the Room Orson is merely standing in a hallway facing a wall. This seemingly harmless practice makes them so uneasy that they lobby Andrew to fire him. But Orson correctly judges that Andrew doesn’t have the nerve, or the authority, to fire anyone. Only the EVP does, but when Orson appeals to that unseen panjandrum, it’s like the Biblical Paul appealing to Ceasar. No good can come of it.
Hamm presents an uncomfortable sight throughout. He must have gained the pandemic 20 lbs. before shooting this role; with his thick body and oversized mustache, he looks like DeNiro in “King of Comedy.” Temporarily gaining the EVP’s favor does nothing to change Orson’s demeanor; he merely looks vindicated and treats his co-workers with additional condescension.
Orson’s momentary success allows him to fantasize about things other than busineess writing. At the office Christmas party, he invites the gorgeous lobby receptionist (Sarah Gadon) into the Room, which opens up into a ballroom where they dance. She so perfectly captures the stereotype of the lovely, young, friendly office crush, that it’s worth sitting through the uncomfortable first half of the movie for her part.
First-time director Joachim Back, a Dane working from the Danish novel of the same name by Jonas Karlsson, does very well. He discovers that low camera angles set at the shoulder level of someone sitting in a desk chair perfectly capture the humiliating experience, and the florescent lighting does a lot too. (The comfy Room is lit much more warmly.)
Orson’s final speech, delivered to his co-workers as a group, reveals the movie’s real agenda.
You people — You can go back to your sagging trolleys and imprecise wording and your banal meteorological obsessions and your absurd rituals. Because the EVPs and then the CEOs and the VIPs, and all the other acronyms, are going to go on with their collateralized debts and their short stocks and their long options.... Listen, they don't care about you. They don't. You're a number in a column on a spreadsheet. This is a corral and you're all livestock, but instead of slaughtering you, they just show you the efficiency metrics and then encourage you to slit your own throat.
That these ideas are uttered using clichés doesn’t make them less true. It’s what we all know to be true, anyway. Orson may not be as superior as he thinks he is, but he does suceed in living out at least one fantasy in a way none of his co-workers could pretend not to hear.