The field’s already a tad crowded with commentaries on the peculiar nature of office life and its inhabitants, homo cubicularis. We’ve seen the absurd, the soul-crushing, the banal, the political, the bureaucratic, the conformist, the rebellious – all expertly skewered by the likes of the venerable “Office Space” and “The Office.” Enter “Cubes,” a film that starts out hinting at a limp retread of familiar terrain only to deliver a surprisingly attentive character piece. Structured as a series of interlocking, vignetted conversations between character pairs, this isn’t a film about the office drone’s relationship to the corporate environment, but about the relationship between workers in the context of corporate culture. “Cubes” looks beyond cubicle partitions to the barriers created by assumptions and expectations – and what happens when these break down.
Director Jason Sherry never uses the camera to break the walls down, however, a tactic that serves well to reinforce the claustrophobic feeling of homo cubicularis’ natural environment. As usual, cubicle-land is a stuffy, anonymous place — a very low-key, deliberately generic character in its own right helped by the production’s detailed set design. (At one point, the requisite obnoxious office cartoon, Ted, mentions COBOL programs. It’s fitting; the film’s vision of cubicle-land does bring to mind archaic programming languages.) But despite valiant camerawork that succeeds, in some instances, in warding off static staging – pseudo-time-lapse transitions between scenes are particularly effective – “Cubes” is more verbal rather than visual, more theatrical than cinematic.
His Motivation Is Clear
So Sherry and screenwriter Mark Zdancewicz give us talking heads in enclosed spaces. Conversations are sometimes stilted or too obviously contrived to create moments of drama – husband Elliot (McGuigan) breaking up with his wife Laurie (Sinavage) in a very public office is quite the stretch – but it’s easy enough to see what Zdancewicz is aiming for: dialogue as the window to a character’s soul. Kind of like theatre, really. Apart from end credit epilogues that prove wholly unnecessary, even tugging at the rug the film so painstakingly weaves, “Cubes” is nicely constructed to give the characters some emotional heft.
The cast is up to the challenge in that endearing indie-film sort of way. Ellen O’Brien gets the shine as a bitter woman with a tender heart. But a few glitches occur when Connie Sinavage draws on the Hayden Christensen acting method to emote or when Conor McGuigan tries to twist his character into both a jerk and a charmer at the same time. Then there’s the question of gratuitous nudity. Is it ironic that actress Jessica Chorey is willing to take her clothes off to play just the kind of character who takes her clothes off to get what she wants, or merely exploitative on Sherry’s part?
“Cubes” is the kind of film that asks viewers to invest themselves in the characters by paying attention to conversations. The execution is hit and miss, but in the grand scheme of things it’s a credible request on the part of Sherry and Zdancewicz.
Entertainment Value: ** (out of two)
Technical Quality: * (out of two)
Cubes. Written by Mark Zdancewicz. Directed by Jason Sherry. Starring Ellen O'Brien, Connie Sinavage, Steve Stylinski, Jeremy Stegura, Conor McGuigan, Greg Korin, Jack Evans and Jessica Chorey. Visit www.echelonstudios.us
Discuss the film and more at Frédérik's blog and MySpace page.