Ol Parker is no stranger to a feel-good star vehicle. He wrote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, and directed Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and Ticket to Paradise, the latter of which was described in this publication by Matt Lynch as “[meeting] the technical criteria to be called a movie, but that is the absolute best thing that could be said about it.” It also involved a subplot about an airline pilot, so that’s one motif that could be carried through Parker’s “oeuvre” thus far, besides his tendency to have well-known actors fall in love amidst blandly rendered settings. Office Romance, in fact, takes this one step further in that it outright confines the proceedings to actual non-places — the corporate offices of an airline company and the surrounding commercial stretches of Manhattan-adjacent New Jersey. But hey, as Brett Goldstein’s British transplant character says at one point while gazing at Manhattan from across the Hudson River, “I like it here… It’s the most beautiful place on Earth.” Satire? One can only hope.
These days, this writer is regularly plagued by existential crises; here, the mini-crisis is that Parker’s latest film actually starts off well in its first act. The writing is raunchy, the jokes are sharp, and the acting is by no means tone-deaf. Jennifer Lopez and Goldstein play, respectively and charismatically, an airline CEO and an attorney of said airline. The opening moments show them at separate, but equally disastrous, dinners that end in Goldstein’s date getting aggressively drunk at an upscale restaurant and Lopez’s guest confusing their business dinner for a date and sobbing over his recent divorce. Immediately there’s a common thread between the two leads: they are voices of reason, and they are all business.
The plot from there follows an ongoing lawsuit against Cruz Airlines, with Lopez’s intimidating CEO enlisting the help of Goldstein’s astute but awkward lawyer to defend her against false accusations of closing a deal by having slept with the client — at least, that what it seems like. Honestly, the details of the case are super misogynist, vague, and ultimately unimportant, because all we’re really asked to care about is that Lopez’s steely demeanor is gradually being disarmed by Goldstein’s fish-out-of-water charm. Inevitably, despite his newcomer status with the company and her namesake as not only its CEO but also the daughter of its founding member (Captain Jack, not to be confused with the pirate), they will — gasp! — develop feelings for one another. This romance is weirdly first hinted at when Goldstein shakes her hand and immediately gets a boner. Hilarity and workplace innuendo ensue, ad infinitum.
Office Romance has the visual texture of any cookie-cutter late-aughts/early-2010s studio rom-com, with perhaps a slightly more grainy filter to make it seem like it boasts some “Golden Age of Aviation” class and style. But here’s where the contradictions set in for the film: for a while, it wants to be irreverent, brash, and profane, with jokes about Goldstein accidentally cumming in J-Lo’s hair, a pregnant colleague who insists she “still fucks,” and one character admitting he masturbates to his ex-wife. On the other hand, especially in its second half, Parker’s film tries to become more of a tender, endearing romance, and it really misses the mark in this regard by leaning into tropes of the genre that have been dated since 2005. For example, Goldstein rushing into a packed press conference to confess his love in a quirky and definitely inappropriate speech to Lopez, who is about to “make a huge, irreversible mistake” in her speech up on stage. The mistake in question? Stepping down from being a high-profile CEO.
On this topic, and most insidiously, there is a third point of tension underpinning what the film wants to evoke: a workaholic attitude. Are we supposed to believe that Goldstein is a progressive corporate lawyer (if that can even be possible) when he leaves in the middle of a deposition, realizing he’s in love with J-Lo and wants to go back to working for her, and shouts in a hurry, “Good luck defending the billion-dollar pharmaceutical company!” My friend, you’re about to plead for your job and relationship back from the CEO of another billion-dollar corporation, one that is notoriously profiteering in its own right. But you’ll need to go back to an earlier moment in Office Romance to locate the the noxious center around which the film revolves. In an infuriating exchange, which served as the turning point between this writer’s enjoyment of the film’s light-hearted, R-rated banter and all of the other fodder that’s conspicuously less fun, J-Lo states makes a comment along the lines of most people viewing work as something to just endure until the weekend finally arrives, whereas she lives and breathes the grind 24/7. Goldstein concurs. She shakes his hand, and then delivers a line that speaks volumes on the film’s behalf: “Thank you for being one of us.”
DIRECTOR: Ol Parker; CAST: Jennifer Lopez, Brett Goldstein, Betty Gilpin, Bradley Whitford, Amy Sedaris; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: June 5; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 53 min.
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