‘Office Space’ still sadly, hilariously relevant at 25
We’re still being nagged about those TPS reports.
When I was 20, Office Space was a funny movie that poked fun at cubicle life and corporate idiocy. I didn’t get it, but I liked its dry humor.
Twenty-five years later, having sat in cubicles similar to the ones Peter Gibbons occupies and having also been asked if I have “a case of the Mondays,” it feels like a horror movie. Yet I’m thankful for it, because it provides the vent I need when work life threatens to feel soul-crushing.
A slow success
While Mike Judge has found great success in the television world with Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill and Silicon Valley, his film career has the unfortunate distinction of being littered with some of the most beloved flops of the last two decades. While Beavis and Butthead Do America cleared a respectable $63 million, his other three cinematic releases have been nothing short of outright disasters.
Idiocracy, the very funny and eerily prescient 2006 comedy, barely received a release, bringing in just $444,000 on under 200 screens. Extract, his last feature, barely cleared $10 million, despite a cast that included Jason Bateman, Kristen Wiig, J.K. Simmons and Ben Affleck (it’s also a very funny movie, even if it never gained the cult success of Judge’s previous two efforts).
And then there’s Office Space, which kicked off his live-action film career in 1999 and went on to become a beloved, endlessly quotable comedy, the movie that told cubicle denizens everywhere that they were seen. Surely the movie that gave us Gary Cole at his most smarmy, the brutal death of the world’s worst fax machine, and the tragic saga of Milton (Stephen Root) and his stapler was a phenomenon, right?
And yet the film, which opened on Feb. 19, 1999, was a non-event at the box office. It opened at number 8, and was out of the top 10 its next weekend. It eventually made back its $10 million budget, but didn’t clear much more than that. It found its life on home video and through repeat viewings on Comedy Central; my guess is it was a balm for those who came home from a terrible office job and found solace in the corporate hell Peter (Ron Livingston) navigates.
Watching Office Space again, however, both its initial failure and eventual cult success are understandable. The film is not a broad, laugh-a-minute comedy. Its humor is dry and satirical; sometimes the jokes feel less like gags and more like wallpaper of the interminable world at Initech. The film is overlit and flat; Judge has never become a visual maestro. The movie feels cheaply produced, its settings bland. It’s a weirdly paced movie; even its heist subplot feels somewhat lackadaisical.
Close to life
And yet, all those things that initially turned audiences off are what caused the movie to be so resonant and embraced throughout the years.
While I used to think Office Space look cheap and bland because Judge was on a limited budget (and, to be sure, that probably plays into it), the masterstroke of its ugliness is that Judge creates a world that feels immediately real to anyone who’s spent time as a corporate drone (I currently work at a university, but I’ve spent enough time in agencies and among gray-padded cubicles to recognize this world). This isn’t a heightened depiction of bureaucratic hell like Brazil. This is the fluorescent-lit, gray-walled industrial park down the road. This is the suffocating, calculated joy of TGI Fridays and the bare apartment of a man toiling 40 hours a week for way too little. Office Space looks small, cramped and bland; and for many, it is all-too-identifiable (there’s a legion of TikTokers trying to sound original at what Judge already captured perfectly in 1999).
Judge’s script is smart, not casting Initech and the corporate world as evil so much as insanely over-complicated, inept and callous. Peter isn’t suffering under the thumb of a cruel boss (Lumberg does let them wear Hawaiian shirts, after all); rather, he’s dying the death of a thousand memos from eight different bosses. Judge locates the little annoyances that can turn eight hours a day into a living hell — the overly chipper coworker, copy machines with their dreaded “paper jam” message, callous “efficiency experts.” There’s the day-to-day routine that aggravates, the same jokes about your name told over and over, the forced cheer of theme restaurants. Judge mines so much humor from everyday tedium; it’s always very funny, but there’s also the sense that it’s so familiar that we’re laughing to keep from crying.
There’s a bit of a plot in Peter being freed from his work-based anxiety and depression after his therapist dies mid-hypnosis, and it’s fun to watch Peter waltz into Initech and immediately set to work disrupting the system — not showing up for a week, gutting fish at his desk, immediately cozying up to “The Bobs.” It’s even funnier when Peter’s carefree attitude is mistaken as prime management material, and the execs seek to curry his favor. There’s also the attempt at a heist, which feels kind of dashed off as a way to build some urgency and structure. But for the most part, Office Space is not memorable for its story so much as for the world it creates.
And if Judge’s visual world is (purposefully) bland, he populates it with a cast that pops. Cole’s Lumberg, with his drawn out “what’s happening” and faux jocularity, is instantly iconic. John C. McGinley’s Bob Slydell steals every scene with just a facial expression, and the tragicomic ordeal of Richard Riehle’s Tom Smykowski might elicit the film’s biggest laugh (“Great things can happen. Just look at me.”). Livingston is fine but largely plays the straight man; he’s upstaged by his costars Ajay Naidu and David Herman as Samir and Michael Bolton, respectively (I particularly love Herman’s mounting anger at sharing a name with a “no-talent ass clown”).
And then there’s Stephen Root as Milton, the Job of the office, suffering multiple indignities but getting the last laugh. Root, of course, makes every project better, but Milton is the character who he will always be associated with. Mumbling and panicked, Root gives the broadest performance in the film — which makes sense, as Office Space is based on cartoons Judge created featuring Milton — and yet it’s so specific and bizarre that it works (Milton’s line “I used to see the squirrels and they were merry” is the most hilarious line of despair in a film full of them).
The film is shaggy and often feels like a series of sketches. Outside of Initech, Judge flounders; the requisite love story with an underused Jennifer Aniston feels like padding, Diedrich Bader gets some laughs as Peter's next door neighbor, but the movie never really knows what to do with him. And the ending feels a bit rushed and too clean; it’s also the one piece (aside from the Y2K plot) that feels dated; in the Cloud age, no way a fire would wipe clean the gang’s misdeeds. But even those flaws give the movie a scrappy charm.
Office Space endures because it’s relatable and very funny. Twenty years on, the corporate world hasn’t changed much; it’s probably only gotten drier and weirder. And that means Judge’s weird little masterpiece has lost none of its punch.