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Aug 14, 2023

'Corner Office' Review: (Not) Being Don Draper

The film goes to show that humanism and absurdism are often two expressions of the same face. Adapted from Swedish novelist Jonas Karlsson’s The Room, director Joachim Back’s Corner Office opens with

The film goes to show that humanism and absurdism are often two expressions of the same face.

Adapted from Swedish novelist Jonas Karlsson’s The Room, director Joachim Back’s Corner Office opens with Orson (Jon Hamm) arriving on the first day of his new job at The Authority. The company, housed in a monolithic, brutalist tower, is likely what the average person thinks of when they think of “Kafkaesque.” Whatever services its workers provide remains a complete mystery, and Orson, the consummate employee, adheres to a strict efficiency-maximizing routine and looks down on his co-workers, particularly his deskmate Rakesh (Danny Pudi), for what he takes to be laziness and incompetence. His stated desire to become “a person to be reckoned with” would seem to be out of joint with his subservience.

While hunting for office supplies, Orson stumbles across the titular office, seemingly unused. For him, this room represents the pinnacle of design, what with its precision layout, the abstract paintings adorning its wood-paneled walls, its lighting, furniture, turntable, and so on. He discovers, moreover, that when inside the office his entire demeanor changes, transforming him into the boss he imagines himself to be, deep down. As the story unfolds, he makes use of this phenomenon to begin his planned ascent through the corporate hierarchy, much to the chagrin of his co-workers and boss, Andrew (Christofer Heyerdahl), who’s as dry as an artificial fern.

Corner Office draws on, even as it undermines, Hamm’s synonymity with his Don Draper persona from Mad Men. When outside the office, Orson’s a bit of a schlump, reminiscent in his tight collars and bushy mustache of the downtrodden petty clerks who populate absurdist fables. Inside the office, he transforms into an exaggerated parody of Don Draper, effortlessly suave, confident, and authoritative. This lightly metafictional tension between the schlumpy Hamm and the one we know from Mad Men drives much of the film’s humor.

Initially, Orson’s ubiquitous voiceover feels redundant, either describing what the images already convey on their own or propping up scenes that would otherwise fall flat for lack of interesting dialogue or character development. But it turns out that this is very much intentional. When it’s revealed that only Orson can enter, let alone perceive, the corner office, the reliability of his narration crumbles, and what the voiceover reports and what we see begin to diverge. It’s even briefly implied that he’s narrating all this for the benefit of a corporate psychologist (Veena Sood), called in by Andrew to evaluate Orson’s fitness for work.

By the time we recognize it as an inner monologue, the voiceover has locked us so securely into Orson’s subjectivity that it becomes difficult to trust the images themselves, and whether the office does or doesn’t exist is repeatedly called into question. At one point, the building’s receptionist, Elisa (Sarah Gadon), intrigued by the sudden favor shown Oscar by his bosses, asks him to take her to the office. The sequence that follows suggests that he really has shown her how to imagine it into existence, turning it into a shared reality. The image of him guiding her hand to the doorknob is so unexpectedly poignant that it fleetingly ruptures the excruciating loneliness and claustrophobia of insanity (or is it genius?) that the film powerfully evokes.

Corner Office presents an interesting counterpoint to Barbie’s two communicating, mutually conditioned levels of reality, which all of the Greta Gerwig film’s characters come to recognize. Back’s film soberingly suggests that any consensus reality we might’ve once had access to is already splintered into as many separate realities as there are individuals. And the vaunted faculty of imagination, which can seem the only escape pod from a banal and oppressive existence, only further entraps us in the prisons of our own minds. Even so, the story opens the possibility of identifying and even sympathizing with Orson’s apparently deranged perspective, which goes to show that humanism and absurdism are often two expressions of the same face.

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William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. His critical writing can also be found at Full Stop. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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