[category]
[title]
It’s been interesting, over the last few years, to watch romcoms wrestling with the restrictive rules of modern dating and romance. Last year’s Materialists grappled with love on the apps, while more recently, Finding Emily sees a shy young man face a baying mob because he attempted a grand gesture. Now Office Romance has that hoary old cliché, the crush on someone at work, faced with the censorious rules of a post-MeToo workplace.
Sadly for this Ol Parker-directed Netflix effort, there’s little that’s new or exciting to say about dating the boss, but at least their working relationship presents a reasonable roadblock to two outrageously attractive people who are hot to jump one another’s bones.
Brett Goldstein is mild-mannered, foul-mouthed lawyer Daniel, who’s taken a job in-house at a US airline run by Jackie Cruz (Jennifer Lopez). When his immediate boss (Bradley Whitford) is injured, he steps in to cover a key deposition in a major lawsuit, and sparks immediately fly with Jackie. The two fight their growing feelings until, inevitably, giving in and hitting the sack – but with Jackie’s management under close scrutiny from her board and only semi-retired father (the always welcome Edward James Olmos), there’s every reason to keep their liaison under the covers.
As with any romcom, there’s little real doubt about the outcome. The question is whether it’s funny along the way, and here we’re helped by Goldstein’s solid script (with co-writer Joe Kelly), because few contemporary writers – male or female – are quite so committed to romance or have such a gift for comedy. That said, there are a couple of strangely discordant moment. A two-nations-divided-by-a-common-language riff about misunderstanding the C-word feels laboured, while a more traditionally silly scene where Lopez reveals an unexpected fetish for tacky British souvenirs is over-egged as the set-up for a bizarre bit of role play.
Still, the two leads mesh unexpectedly well together given their different styles, and while Parker’s direction is only workmanlike, he has assembled a rogue’s gallery of character actors in support. Betty Gilpin’s sharp-tongued, disapproving and heavily pregnant Sydney is a particular delight, but watch out for Tony Hale as the long-suffering head of HR and a lovely little bit of scene-stealing from Roger Bart as a rival airline owner.
In the end, it doesn’t say much more about dating where you work than the old-fashioned, possibly Lopez-starring romcoms that preceded it. There are no messy power issues between these two confident and generally reasonable people, and no rough edges to navigate beyond public opinion. Perhaps it was too much to hope that we’d have a little bit of food for thought as well as the eye candy on display, but this will still wile away a dull evening very pleasantly.
Streaming on Netflix worldwide now.