Corner Office was reviewed out of the Tribeca Film Festival, where it made its world premiere.
In Joachim Back’s Corner Office, Jon Hamm plays the anti-Don Draper (the role that made him famous on AMC’s Mad Men) in a sly bit of casting that works wonders for the surreal workplace satire. Unfortunately, it’s the movie’s only consistent high point. Hamm is wonderfully strange as a stiff nine-to-fiver who discovers a secret, pristine workspace that becomes his private escape, but the story’s absurdist metaphors for the capitalist rat race peak early, and continue to plateau until things eventually peter out. It’s worth a few chuckles, but little more.
Written by Ted Kupper, who adapts the story from Jonas Karlsson’s Swedish novel The Room, Corner Office strikes an immediate aesthetic chord, at it follows the diligent Orson (Hamm) on his first day at the corporate office of The Authority, a vaguely named megacorporation with an equally vague function, whose Brutalist skyscraper extends well into the clouds. Hamm’s lumbering gait is matched by his rigid voiceover, which describes The Authority’s dull lights and concrete surroundings as if he were programmed to interpret them as bright and cheery. With his large spectacles, caricatured moustache, and a hairdo chopped awkwardly into a permanent side part, Orson is a man out of time, a feeling enhanced by the litany of 20th and 21st century design influences all around him. His sloppy desk mate, Rakesh (Danny Pudi), works on a flat-screen computer, but has messy hair and sideburns that harken back to the ’70s. His unnerving boss, Andrew (Christopher Heyerdahl), has the slick hair and pencil moustache of a man plucked from Hollywood’s golden age, but in the middle of his modernist glass office sits an ergonomic gaming chair.
As Orson introduces us to his new coworkers one by one, there’s a farcical disconnect between his observations and the images on screen, made all the more bizarre by Orson’s uncomfortable impersonations of a man adjusted to corporate small talk. What makes the decision to cast Hamm feel so spectacular is that he leans into type on multiple opposing fronts, as a man who hopes to mold himself in the image of moneyed success (à la Draper) and a man whose every strained interaction is marvelously awkward (à la his underrated comedic roles on sitcoms like 30 Rock). When Orson stumbles upon a secret office room on the floor of his division — its warm décor is a far cry from the building’s otherwise oppressive grey; it’s lush and comfortable, like the private workspace of a powerful CEO — he also begins to perceive himself as a man rising confidently through the ranks, and deserving of such perks. If nothing else, it’s fun watching Jon Hamm play a man trying (and mostly, failing) to be a “Jon Hamm type.”
There’s something odd about this room, between the sunlight from its windows turning off alongside its other lights, and the fact that it’s been lying empty, waiting for an obsessive climber like Orson to park himself in its luscious chairs. Add to this the fact that no one else in the office seems to acknowledge its existence, and you have the recipe for a strange and amusing mystery, centered on a meticulous worker drone who’s acutely aware (and in some ways, proud) of his place at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy, since it’s a stepping stone to some phantomic success. However, Corner Office very quickly lays its cards on the table, with regards to what’s really going on with this room, why the other workers won’t admit it exists, and the precise nature of its capitalist metaphor. From there on out, it mostly functions as an exercise in following a deeply troubled man, as the film continues to extract repetitive punchlines from a singular situation (even if Frans Bak and Keld Haaning Ibsen’s mischievous, mysterious score continues down intriguing thematic passageways long after Corner Office has given up).
As an exercise in corporate satire, it quickly wears thin, despite its penchant for framing odd and off-beat happenings in the background of each shot. However, Hamm’s gonzo commitment — as a man whose stillness radiates the comedic energy of a pie gag — prevents the film from coming to a complete standstill, as Orson oscillates between anxious paranoia and smug self-assurance. It may not go anywhere in particular, but the choice to cast Jon Hamm as the anti-Jon Hamm pays off as well as it can.
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