Taglines: Four girls. Four dreams. One office.
Clockwatchers movie storyline. Iris (Collette) is a shy young professional who doesn’t want to rock the boat at the office where she temps. Margaret (Posey) is the polar opposite, and serves as a catalyst to help Iris become more assertive. Paula (Kudrow) eagerly awaits post-work happy hours and the chance to flirt with attractive men.
Jane (Ubach) is engaged to marry a jerk who is already cheating on her. Margaret hopes to become a permanent employee as an assistant to Mr. Lasky (Bob Balaban), but her dreams are thwarted when he suddenly dies. The four temps form a camaraderie which assists them in getting through their boring and tedious days at work.
A series of thefts occur in the office and suspicion falls on the temps, particularly Margaret. When Iris finds a plastic monkey inside Margaret’s desk that she had thought was stolen, Iris loses faith in Margaret and believes that she is the office thief. Margaret suggests a one-day strike from work due to mistreatment and being under appreciated as temps, and her friends halfheartedly agree to join her, but on the appointed day Margaret is the only one who does not come to work.
As a result, the company’s officious head of human resources (Debra Jo Rupp) fires Margaret, and management micromanages the remaining three temps. Iris, Paula and Jane’s friendship comes to an end as result of the stress, ending the camaraderie among the temporary workers, and eventually they all go their separate ways. Paula is upset when she learns of Jane’s wedding from a newspaper announcement, to which she was not invited, and leaves to work in another department.
It is later discovered that another employee (a rich girl who was hired as a permanent employee after her first day) was the thief and that Margaret simply had a similar toy in her desk. Iris confronts the thief when her diary disappears; Iris later receives a new diary and note of apology.
Clockwatchers is an American comedy-drama film released in 1997. Directed by Jill Sprecher, it stars Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Toni Collette and Alanna Ubach as temporary office staffers in an office complex. The four become misfit friends in an office environment where they are ignored and mistrusted by their co-workers.
Film Review for Clockwatchers
When your whole life revolves around meaningless office drudgery, molehills become mountains, petty theft looms like grand larceny and the most casual glances exchanged among co-workers can acquire a dark conspiratorial significance. This particular blend of boredom and paranoia is expertly evoked in Jill Sprecher’s small, gently surreal comedy, ”Clockwatchers.”
As it follows the lives of four office temps who work side by side in the sterile cubicles of a corporate colossus called Global Credit, the movie rubs your face in the petty humiliations endured by women at the low end of the company totem pole.
”Clockwatchers” observes this world through the eyes of Iris (Toni Collette), a shy newcomer to Global Credit who, during her first day on the job, is befriended by the flouncing, rebellious Margaret (Parker Posey), a peripatetic temp who has thought up a hundred little ways to sabotage the companies she works for. Margaret introduces Iris to her co-workers Paula (Lisa Kudrow) and Jane (Alanna Ubach), and the four become a gossipy clique of lunchtime companions and confidantes.
Each of the four has her quirks. Iris lives with a father who has high hopes for his daughter’s corporate advancement. But because she has no particular ambition, Iris lies to him about sending out job applications and following up on contacts. Paula, whose hairdo changes dramatically every few days, believes she is ”special” and fantasizes becoming a famous actress.
Jane, who is a bundle of obsessive-compulsive tics, is biding her time at Global Credit before marrying a man who lavishes her with gifts and picks her up every day in his sports car. Although Jane, with her devoted boyfriend, is supposedly the luckiest of the four, there is an ambiguous scene that suggests her Prince Charming is already fooling around behind her back.
By far the spunkiest of this group is Margaret, whom Ms. Posey plays with a compelling mixture of abrasive bravado and wrenching sadness. We’ve all known Margarets, people who are wildly overqualified for the numbing tasks they’ve been assigned and who self-destruct when their rage bubbles up uncontrollably.
”Clockwatchers” gets many of the details of office life eerily right: the arrogant, smarmy male executives who affect a patronizing jocularity with secretaries whose names they can never remember; the iron-fisted boss who huffs windily about everyone in the company being a ”family”; the petty tyrant who doles out pencils as though they were gold bullion.
The story of ”Clockwatchers” revolves around an office witch hunt after some petty thievery in which suspicion falls on the four friends. Before the mystery is solved, the women have been interrogated and set against one another, and their desks inspected by grim security guards. The investigation is conducted with a chilling politeness that underscores the fact that all four are viewed as disposable cheap labor.
As Iris, Ms. Collette displays the same gawky charm with an undercurrent of stubbornness that she brought to ”Muriel’s Wedding.” But ”Clockwatchers” ultimately belongs to Ms. Posey. The actress whose flamboyant look-at-me attitude can be grating when not carefully reined, finds a core of tragedy in a character whose proud fighting spirit has curdled into a kind of free-floating hysteria.
Clockwatchers (1998)
Directed by: Jill Sprecher
Starring: Toni Collette, Parker Posey, Lisa Kudrow, Alanna Ubach, Paul Dooley, Helen FitzGerald, Debra Jo Rupp, Jamie Kennedy, Joshua Malina, Scott Mosenson
Screenplay by: Jill Sprecher, Karen Sprecher
Production Design by: Pamela Marcotte
Cinematography by: Jim Denault
Film Editing by: Stephen Mirrione
Costume Design by: Edi Giguere
Set Decoration by: Greta Grigorian
Music by: Mader
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for brief language.
Distributed by: BMG Independents
Release Date: May 15, 1998
Hits: 373
