They Have Work to Do

By Richard Corliss Sunday, Apr. 14, 2002
    • People don't work in movies. They play around, kick butt, fall in love or lust. How they cope with the pains and tiny triumphs of their jobs--in these things, films show virtually no interest, leaving that task to workplace sitcoms and cop and lawyer shows. The idea has always been that people won't pay to see at the 'plex what they just left in the office. To be forced to review our working lives on the big screen--that's not escape, that's overtime.

    Yet a job is often how we define ourselves; where we met the people we marry or the lovers who ended that marriage. It's where our ethics are tested. For the great gray majority of Dilberts, it is our battleground--or burial ground. For when we lose that job, we lose part of our identity.


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    So letters of commendation--one a bit more heartfelt than the other--are in order for two ambitious films about people trying to stay in control when they are at work or out of it. The more conventional of the two, Changing Lanes, is about two men--slick lawyer Gavin (Ben Affleck) and harried insurance salesman Doyle (Samuel L. Jackson)--who collide on a Manhattan highway while rushing to respective court appointments. Gavin needs to secure judicial approval of his firm's right to manage a dead man's billions; Doyle hopes to win back his separated wife and his kids. Gavin heedlessly drives off, leaving Doyle with a disabled car as well as a folder crucial to Gavin's case. Can Gavin get the folder from the fellow he has just abandoned? Or will they kill each other in a game of let's-see-how-evil-I-can-be?

    The ways in which writers Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin escalate the conflict often bend plausibility, and director Roger Michell sometimes kicks the melodrama into fantasyland. But at heart this parable, well acted by a veteran cast, is one of those serious "gerund movies" (Pushing Tin, Falling Down) about the scars we leave on the folks we dash past in our rush to do our job. Their world disintegrates, and all we notice, for a second, is the puff of smoke behind us.

    But what of a man who has lost his job and is afraid to share his failure with those closest to him? The hero of Laurent Cantet's Time Out (L'emploi du temps) uses his enforced spare time the way he always did: driving his car from Pointless A to Pointless B, sitting in office lobbies, pretending to prepare for that big conference. Vincent (the fascinatingly opaque Aurelien Recoing) still needs to pay the bills, so he dreams himself a bigger job, sells dummy shares in his nonexistent new company to friends and family, dabbles in black-market trading. Finally, he has work that excites him.

    This being a modern French film--and a terrific one--the real drama is not in the twists of plot (by Cantet and Robin Campillo) but in the subtle emotions playing on the face of a man both liberated by his career catastrophe and troubled by the lie he has made of his life. At the end, Vincent has one more job interview. In a squirmy close-up, he registers the deadpan horror of someone who realizes he is in for a lifetime of doing what he hates: working.