‘Corner Office’ Review: Jon Hamm Switches Jobs, Playing a Dull Desk Jockey in This Indie Oddity
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film CriticIn “Mad Men,” Jon Hamm had his corner office: the room with a view, overlooking Madison Avenue, where Don Draper could work, drink and brainstorm in peace.
Maybe that’s why the actor was drawn to playing a lowly paper-pusher with a bad mustache and big dreams of occupying such a space in “Corner Office,” a low-key, screw-loose workplace satire that offers audiences a side of Hamm they’ve never seen before — and might not be in such a hurry to experience again, unless the toil-from-home blues of the pandemic have made them receptive to the call of cubicle life.Premiering at the Tribeca Festival, “Corner Office” is director Joachim Back’s slightly taxing cinematic take on “The Room,” a slender novel by Swedish actor-cum-author Jonas Karlsson, unread by me, that bills itself as “a short, sharp and fiendish fable in the tradition of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and Charlie Kauffman.” Check, check and check, insofar as those three absurdist writers are concerned, though I’d quibble with the other descriptors in that pitch.
Slow, blunt and benign, the film stretches its relatively thin premise — that Hamm’s character, Orson, has discovered a secret office stashed halfway between the elevator and the lavatory of his thankless new desk job — to more than 100 minutes, reducing Orson to a pathetic figure in the process.
Film fans will recognize the opening shot, which is not identical but at least super-similar to the overhead view of a snow-covered parking lot from “Fargo,” a tough-to-top portrait of a similarly exasperated drone (William H.
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