Directed By Ol Parker

Starring – Jennifer Lopez, Brett Goldstein, Betty Gilpin

The Plot – Jackie (Lopez), President and CEO of Air Cruz, runs a tight ship in her business, including a rigid anti-fraternization policy for all her employees. When a new sexy lawyer (Goldstein) begins working for her, that policy becomes tantalizingly tested.

Rated R for sexual material, adult language throughout, and graphic nudity.

Office Romance | Jennifer Lopez & Brett Goldstein | Official Trailer | Netflix

POSITIVES

Even for an at-home experience that fails to ignite the sparks of a supposedly steamy love story, Office Romance does manage to entertain in sporadically isolated doses, particularly as a result of its decorated ensemble, who give their all to the vulnerabilities and personalities of their characters, in order to render the distinct sensibilities of Parker’s acquired tone. While the dynamic pairing of Jennifer Lopez and Brett Goldstein certainly lacks any semblance of measurable chemistry between them, individually they supplant a three-dimensional stature to the detectability of the engagement, where their influential charisma’s play wonderfully to the bizarreness and internalized transparency transpiring casually before us, in turn unlocking the dependable charms of Goldstein’s sternly dry demeanor and cheeky humor with the rough-around-the-edges sensitivity of Lopez reveling in the character’s own fight for equality in a male-dominated industry. While neither give the best performances of either of their careers, or even within this movie, their intellectual prowess and physical features make it effortlessly easy to interpret why they’re each falling for each other so abruptly during the movie’s opening act, emulating powerfully grounded characters who are easy to root for, despite the script so incapably fleshing them out to a deeper significance and understanding. While Lopez and Goldstein effectively elicit a commanding presence over the interpretation, it’s actually the supporting cast that are most meaningful to the minimal instances of credible integrity that the experience occasionally garners for itself, where everyone from Tony Hale, to Jodie Wittaker, to even Bradley Whitford supplants these wildly eccentric personalities capable of captivating under thankless circumstances, without the need for consistent focus to frame their irreplaceable value. But even with the magnitude of star power previously conveyed, it’s truly Betty Gilpin’s world that everyone else in the movie is living in, with the delicacy of her character’s pregnant irritability eliciting these crankily condescending outbursts that rises to levels of unbridled intensity when the reality of her best friend and boss becomes romantically involved with a co-worker. Gilpin’s attention-stealing voracity certainly makes her capable of leading a movie of her own within this exploited subgenre, but the periodic intrusions help to maintain the freshness of Betty’s appeal to the long-winded storytelling, all the while gifting us a refreshingly unrestrained version of the sassy supporting friend trope that has bonded so many of these movies under one derivative roof. Beyond the credible performances, the only other thing to praise about the movie was the abundance of established stakes and circumstances to Jackie’s impulsive decisions, which the script does capably conjure to produce some semblance of compelling drama to an otherwise juvenile atmosphere. For my money, the third act of this movie, even with all of its predictably overwrought resolutions, is ironically the one time throughout the film where I remained faithfully invested to what the script was continuously throwing at me, where it not only fleshed out this empathetic vulnerability to Jackie’s design that was previously missing throughout the first half of the movie, but also the distinguished moment where reality seemingly catches up to those involved in the primary conflict, balancing more of its aforementioned aggressive humor with more of a subtle underlining that didn’t feel like a gimmick of its own within the film.

NEGATIVES

The pleasantries stop there, however, as Office Romance is every bit the derivatively dry and uninspiringly predictable engagement expected within an interchangeable subgenre whose creative well has been exploited dry from better predecessors before it, with little in the way of ambitious deviation to capably separate itself from the overstuffed and outdated pack. For starters, Goldstein’s script that he co-wrote with Joe Kelly constantly feels like it’s on the wrong side of memorability alongside these abundance of genre-heavy tropes that make their presence felt without any semblance of uniqueness to contort the ways they’re frequently enacted to the evidential detectability of the engagement, where elements pertaining to a blossoming love, a misunderstanding break-up, and a third act resolution where one character travels long distance to profess their love to the other, wedge an unforeseen transparency that feels attainable as quickly as the motions of the plot begin to take shape during the opening act, opting for a love at first sight kind of flourishing to the depicted romance, without any semblance of credible characterizing to give us a deeper sense of knowledge and understanding for the kinds of financial security that an overwhelming majority of its audience can’t relate to. That’s not to say that wealthy people can’t be relatable, it’s just that these characters are presented so one-dimensionally and undetailed that it essentially asks us to care about a moral dilemma without understanding the importance of the stakes that hang cautiously in the balance, without any incremental usage of its tediously overlong nearly two hour runtime to utilize the kind of necessary development that allows us to view the characters as people rather than types. Because the writers lacks any kind of cognitive clarity to perceive the lack of momentum brandished from scenes so flatly unfunny, dramatically dry, and illogically outlined, it makes the excursion to remain faithfully invested feel like a clumsily contorting chore to our experiences with these characters, instead of a gripping conflict constantly elevating the tension of outsider intrusion to their inner-office hanky panky, and while I’ve definitely had deeper fits of boredom with worse films this year, Office Romance is the single biggest glaring example of a lackadaisical industry with the intention of giving audiences what they paid for, producing this dejecting lack of urgency in the transpiring of the narrative, which feels all the more disinteresting in the ability to watch this at home, where falling asleep feels more possible than ever. If Goldstein and Kelly attempt any kind of deviation on the formulaic foray, it’s definitely in the depths of its controversially advertised R-rated material, where the forced vulgarities of character dialogue and unnecessarily gruesome imagery makes this feel like a romantic comedy helmed by the geniuses that brought you the three movies of the American Pie franchise not involving the core members in tow. I express this unflattering honesty because none of it feels naturally enacted from the depths of these classily elegant personalities, instead feeling like post-screening studio notes, as a way of ushering for the kinds of adolescent audiences who wouldn’t give this kind of movie a chance in the first place, and considering the comedy truly only lands when Gilpin’s erratic tendencies elevates the material with Herculean strength, it proves how flimsy its individual gags were conceived in theory, instead evoking these abrasively jarring tonal shifts throughout much of the movie’s first half, where the balance between multiple screenwriters can be felt the loudest in its lack of cohesive tendencies. The single biggest example of tastelessness between them undeniably pertains to the movie’s shameless need to go out of its way towards candidly depict a child birth sequence as invasively revealing as you might expect with elaborately detailed practical effects bringing the child to life, and though the effect itself and the corresponding editing techniques are impressive for rendering realism to the depiction, they are wasted revoltingly with shocking gross-out gags so desperately dire to instill any semblance of memorability to the occasion, without anything remotely funny to deviate its mind-numbing randomness. But despite everything that I’ve previously said about its detracting components, the single most unforgiveable aspect among the movie’s entirety might just come from attaching Wes Anderson’s iconic Director of Photography, Robert Yeoman, to helm the movie’s cinematography, where a blandly dull and monotonous canvas wastes away the talents from one of Hollywood’s most transfixing visual storyteller, on its way to a lack of definitive personality exuded in his techniques and tangibility. When you consider the intricate amount of detail and luminating color coordination that Yeoman was able to render in storyboard visuals that frame sequences so cleverly and creatively, the lack of pageantry that we’re left with here disappoints in ways that make it difficult to understand why the production even opted for one of the industry’s most unique visionaries to shoot it, and while much about Office Romance can be denounced to miscalculation among its many moving pieces, it’s the lack of framed passion off-screen from arguably its biggest casting that is most detrimental to the movie’s integrity, crafting such a lack of pizazz to the presentation that screams streaming quality.

OVERALL
Office Romance is a ruthlessly raunchy and chemistry-free labor of love that errors too close to the wrong side of contentment, with its coldly clamorous workplace entendre failing to elicit a conductive spark to turn up the heat behind closed doors. While the talented ensemble are game for Ol Parker’s aggressively adolescent antics, the lazily enacted creative outline opts for the abundance of time honored tropes within the subgenre, that makes its nearly two hour engagement an indulgingly overlong and predictably barebones experience, void of the kinds of exploratory surprises or luminating artistry that helps transcend its streaming sensibilities.

My Grade: 4.1 or D-