Office Girl

Novelist Meno's dull, derivative sketch trails Guy (James Vickery), a sad-sack phone operator in a nameless corporation whose obsessions are record collecting and the new girl in the neighboring cubicle. Guy is molded from the same hipster-nebbish clay as a lot of other pop-lit heroes of late, from those of Rushmore and Garden State to Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby. More than anything else, though, Office Girl seems to owe its existence to Woody Allen. It's yet another iteration of the "neurotic guy meets quirky girl" formula; imagine Annie Hall if its cultural references were Pavement and Joy Division rather than Marshall McLuhan.

Office is a mélange of themes that don't add up to much. Guy takes cigarette breaks with his boorish record-collector friend Buddy. He visits his other boorish record-collector friend Ray, who has an inoperable brain tumor and is in the hospital after his third suicide attempt. He banters and flirts with Odile (Kara Peterson), the titular free spirit. But Meno doesn't seem to have anything in mind for his characters. They talk at one another, each of them a mouthpiece for some clever thing the author wants to say, but none of them has a life of his or her own or anything at stake. Ray is dying one way or another, Buddy is happily unhappy in his pretension, and Guy admits that he's too cowardly to leave his office life, not that he seems to want to do so. Vickery and Peterson are both fairly appealing actors, but Meno's aimless play gives them little to work toward.—Kris Vire