1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 77: The daytrippers

You’ll enjoy this movie only if you can stomach its matriarch, Rita (Anne Meara).

“She’s an insufferable scold,” complains Roger Ebert,

and since she’s onscreen or nearby for almost the entire film, her presence becomes unbearable. It has been said that you should never marry anyone you are not prepared to take a three-day bus trip with. I wouldn’t even get into a cab with Rita. … I do not mean to criticize Meara herself. She is, almost by definition, superb at her assignment here, which is to create an insufferable mother. The film’s problem is that she does it so well.

Four people spend the day with Rita: her husband (Pat McNamara); their daughters, Eliza (Hope Davis) and Jo (Parker Posey); and Jo’s boyfriend (Liev Schreiber). They drive from Long Island into the City to track down Eliza’s office-worker husband, Louis (Stanley Tucci), who might be cheating on her. Eliza has found what appears to be a love note among Louis’s possessions. Her family members don’t take this red flag very seriously. Their trip to the City is basically a joyride. Well, who hasn’t devised some spurious errand in order to get out of the house on the day after Thanksgiving?

What ensues – a surreal excursion through darkest Manhattan – isn’t so different from Scorsese’s After Hours; only, it happens in daytime, with a station-wagonful of family members gnawing on one another. Still, I must disagree with Ebert. These people actually behave pretty civilly toward each other, all things considered. Rita is a bit monstrous, yes, but I’ve met worse. It takes a lot of aggravation before the seams in this family tear; and when they do, it’s not all Rita’s fault. Rita herself is pretty hilarious, compulsively overstepping social boundaries: usurping strangers’ hospitality, getting personal details wrong (she tells a young woman who insists on being called Cassandra, “I bet a lot of people call you Sandy”; no, they don’t, but try getting that into Rita’s brain). In a grim comedy like this one, these little outrages are the point. But you have to be in the mood.

Rita isn’t even the most insufferable character. That prize is shared by Jo’s pretentious boyfriend (an aspiring novelist) and various yuppies (career literati). Here the movie twists the knife. You’d expect hamfisted suburbanite Rita to bulldoze these people, but no, she’s in their thrall and blind to the plight of her unfortunately-paired daughters, who see the world with clearer eyes.

But maybe you don’t want to endure this Rita character for more than a few minutes. Then I recommend you see Meara in this episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Talk of a lousy mother!

It amuses me to recall that Ben Stiller is Meara’s child.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 75: Clockwatchers

Four office temps, clockwise from top-left: Paula (Lisa Kudrow), Jane (Alanna Ubach), Margaret (Parker Posey), and Iris (Toni Collette, in her wallflower mode).

Here’s the office manager: Barbara (Debra Jo Rupp).

And for kicks: Art, the weirdo in charge of the supplies.

The standouts are Margaret and Barbara. Margaret is the most spirited of the temps. She’s the quickest to criticize the company. Her clothing mocks the “business casual” style.

Barbara is evil. She’s a stock character – think of Prof. Umbridge, of the Harry Potter series. But don’t we all know someone like this, so sugary, so cruel? The niche fills itself.

There’s no glory in landing a mid-level job in this corporation. Look at Barbara; look at Art (I haven’t even mentioned the loathsome Bob Balaban character). Who in his or her right mind would aspire to that? This only makes the temps’ plight more poignant. They long for permanent employment. They’ve clocked in and out, for years, for this or that company. Some have worked diligently; others, not so much. It has made no difference either way. For them, “tenure” is beyond reach, as if by unspoken decree: These four shall not be gathered in. Permanency, at least at the level just above temp-hood, is for the Arts and Barbaras of this world: mediocrities’ mediocrities. If you’re female and dowdy (Iris), desperate (Paula), old-fashioned (Jane), or clever (Margaret), that elevator is closed. If you’re incapable of titanic complacency, the elevator is closed.

The four temps may not be happy with this state of affairs, but at least their common plight makes them friends.

Their comradery is tested when another young woman joins the company to do permanent secretarial work.

The temps are baffled. This new worker (Helen FitzGerald) is evidently dowdy, desperate, and old-fashioned (her cleverness is impossible to gauge; she barely speaks). How did she get the job?

A spate of thieving begins in the office. The higher-ups suspect the temps. They ask who else would be poor enough to resort to stealing, as if money were the sole incentive.

The temps suspect the new worker. Then, as the mystery drags on and this new uncertainty compounds their chronic anxiety, they suspect each other.

I’ve seen it written that Clockwatchers, unlike most movies, is about what work is actually like. That must be qualified. It’s less about what goes on at work than about temporary employment as a state of mind. The “work” in this movie is stylized. The workplace is overly sterile. The walls are too bare. The muzak is Les Baxter – only the blandest Les Baxter (no Ritual of the Savage). The workers swivel in their chairs a little too demonstratively, stare a little too hard at the clock, abuse the office supplies a little too grimly. (White-Out becomes nail polish; markers are used to induce chemical highs.) That’s no knock against the movie, which doesn’t aspire to realism on the physical level.

What isn’t stylized, what’s brutally accurate, is what the limbo between non-work and permanent work feels like. The longing for security, for inclusion, is warping. Is it more warping than the low-level insiders’ determination to keep the outsiders out? Perhaps not. But this movie is about the outsiders, not the insiders. It’s about those who don’t just watch the hours. They also watch the clock measuring one’s prospects of attaining the lowest level of “success.”

The same thing happens in universities. There are permanent faculty, who, ideally, form some sort of community; permanent staff; and temporary workers: adjuncts and tutors, who are pretty well out in the cold.

I was a university temp for seven years. (I don’t count the previous seven years of graduate study, which was genuine apprenticeship. The grad school timeline is more definite, and its occupants are treated as honorary community members.) I enjoyed good relations with my fellow temps, especially in the last three or four years. Actually, no, I enjoyed good relations with the writing tutors. There was another group tutors whose misbehavior, like the petty thievery in the movie, became a consuming distraction. I didn’t blame them so much as certain higher-ups who seemed wilfully oblivious.

But enough about me; that time of my life is over. The point is, the movie resonates.