In a time where good rom-coms are rare, Office Romance is one that just barely makes the cut.
Written by Sydney Grulloń-Matos
Set in the great state of New Jersey, Office Romance follows airline CEO Jackie (Jennifer Lopez) and the newest member of the company’s legal department, Daniel (Brett Goldstein), a transplant from the UK, as they struggle to avoid the growing attraction between them while working closely together during a lawsuit that threatens to end Jackie’s career.
Spoiler alert: this is a rom-com, and they give in.
When we first meet Jackie, she’s having a business dinner with Larry (Will Sasso), who thinks it can be more than a business dinner…except he spends the entire time talking about his ex-wife, making their meeting about anything but business. Daniel, on the other hand, is actually on a first date… that ends terribly. His date is an obnoxious calorie counter who gets so drunk that she starts arguing with other patrons in the restaurant, gets up onto a table, busts her lip (and several teeth) when she falls off, and still thinks she’s going to get laid. Needless to say, it’s not going great for either of them.
We quickly learn that Jackie’s sex life is non-existent and has been for a while—to the point that it’s even brought up in the lawsuit against the airline. We also learn that Daniel is the newest member of the airline’s legal team, having moved from England for the job.
When Daniel’s boss, Peter (Bradley Whitford), chokes on a breakfast burrito and is out of commission, he’s bumped up onto the deposition team for the lawsuit against the airline, meaning he’ll have to work with Jackie directly. He’s warned by everyone that he’s going to need luck—and lots of it—when it comes to her, because she’s not the easiest to work with.
In their first meeting, he does everything he was warned not to do, and to top it all off, when he and Jackie shake hands to seal their new partnership…Daniel gets a boner. It’s the first scene in the film that really shows what audiences are in for when it comes to the comedy of the film—a stark reminder that it’s written by men, and many times, they will make a dick joke when they can.
As the film progresses and the relationship between its leads does too, there are more jokes in a similar vein—about bodily fluids in people’s hair, women’s grooming preferences for their pubic hair, and the overused bit where the woman says daddy when referring to her actual father, and her partner thinks he’s talking about her. For some, the jokes are too low-brow and immature for a rom-com, and I get that, but to me, they were fine, and I laughed out loud a handful of times.
One thing that stood out to me about the film, though, was that, while written by two white men (Goldstein and Joe Kelly), they nailed one particular aspect of Latin culture on the head. Latino families almost always give their children an inappropriate nickname and continue to call them that throughout their entire lives. For Jackie, her father (played by Edward James Olmos, who played Lopez’s father in Selena (1997)) calls her "gordita," which translates to "little fattie," and we learn that he’s called her that during board meetings for the airline, constantly undermining her authority in the eyes of the rest of the board. It’s a detail that surprised me, but knowing that the film was written with Lopez in mind makes the detail make sense.
Another thing that stood out was the film's music. There’s a moment where Jackie and Daniel are in the Dominican Republic, and a bachata version of Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You, is played by a live band. Being Dominican-American, this was a moment where I sat up in bed because I could not believe what I was hearing. It’s so rare that films with Latino characters take a moment to integrate both cultures into the music in such a specific way.
The best part of the film is, without a doubt, Betty Gilpin as Jackie’s right-hand woman, Sydney. When she catches a whiff of what’s going on between Jackie and Daniel, she cock blocks them at every chance she gets because interoffice relationships are against the company’s policies. She also knows Daniel is a distraction to Jackie, and she simply can’t let that happen. She’s also heavily pregnant and unafraid to call out men whenever she wants, because she knows that no one is going to tell her otherwise. Her hatred of Daniel throughout the film is truly a highlight, because no matter how genuine he is—because he is a very, very sincere man—she can’t stand him, and their little rivalry comes to a head when she goes into labor in his office, forcing him to help her give birth. It might be the funniest scene in the film, with Jackie and Daniel each holding one of Sydney’s legs as she refuses to push until they tell her what happened between them on their trip to the Dominican Republic. It’s a scene that really reminds everyone that Betty Gilpin is one of the funniest people alive.
Another highlight of the film is the myriad of notable actors who make up its ensemble—Broadway stars Roger Bart and Ali Stoker, comedic actors Amy Sedaris and Tony Hale, TV veterans Tony Plana and Michelle Hurd, and Jodie Whittaker, the first female doctor on Doctor Who—it's a band of faces recognizable to many.
Overall, the chemistry between Lopez and Goldstein is just fine—much like the film itself. It’s not anything that would be memorable for years to come, like Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (1990), or Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally... (1989). There’s no stand-out moment between the two that will join the rom-com lexicon—they’re just two good-looking people that you want to see have a good time together, and they do, but any truly intimate scenes in the film fade to black, which is a damn shame. They go through the typical rom-com tropes for an office setting—sneaking around, inside jokes in public meetings, and of course, the great big declaration of love, which happens in the middle of a press conference where Jackie is about to resign to spare their relationship from going public via blackmail. It’s a sweet film that gives audiences exactly what it promises them from the start —a happy ending.
In a time where good rom-coms are rare, Office Romance is one that just barely makes the cut.
Office Romance is now streaming on Netflix.
Photos: Netflix
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