Nine to Five

Nine to Five is a delicious bit of fluff. It is a wacky, madcap screwball comedy with laughs aplenty about three employees whose daydreams about murdering their boss end up having real world consequences. I’m a massive fan of the screwball comedy, so I had a great time with this movie.

Normally screwball comedies are also romantic comedies, but this film deviates from that formula. In place of the central couple that grows closer through the wild and hilarious scenarios of the film are a trio of strong minded and independent women, each with a unique story and background that brought them to this particular nondescript 1980s megacorporation. One is from a poor background and married, one a widow with kids, another divorced and childless.

This three person group, each with their varying but fairly equally annoyed, perspective on their work life provides a great deal of the fuel that powers the film’s engine. This is mainly concentrated on their misogynist boss and all the cruel, but subtle and underhanded, ways he takes advantage of them. The youngest one is the one he sexually harasses in hopes she will sleep with him, the older one is the secret glue that keeps his department running for which he takes all the credit, and so on. This could lead to a bunch of tired cliches and political grandstanding, but Nine to Five is better than that.

The writing is clever here, and not without a certain amount of bite, as this mechanism is used to explore the ways, even setting aside the battle of the sexes, old, established, and dogmatic thinkers and leaders actually weigh companies down either with the inability to adapt or their unwillingness to see their workers as anything more than cogs in a machine. It even explores the way that some workers are complicit in the perpetuation of the system, through things as overt as informing on coworkers to the boss or as subtle as engaging in unkind office gossip. This, however, isn’t the only way that the writing is clever.

A certain amount of deft touch is required to keep all of the wild balls juggled in the air to make a madcap comedy really work and not just be a zany series of events. Nine to Five is able to do this quite well. For example, the movie shows real skill at setting up an idea, often in a very subtle way, and then picking the exact right way or time to pay it off. My favorite of these involves the scene where the three coworkers get intoxicated and each shares an individualized fantasy of how they would kill their boss if they could. Then, through the course of the film, each of these fantasies comes back, in one form or another, the deeper the girls get caught up in events of the film.

Everyone does a really great job with their roles, but the stand out surprise to me was Dolly Parton. I didn’t know she had the acting chops to keep up with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in a straight comedy. I knew she had been in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and was well thought of in it, but that is a musical and more obviously in her wheelhouse. In this, while she does provide the eponymous theme song, that is by and large the only singing of hers in the movie. Nine to Five may have a few wacky bones in its body but it is far more grounded and demanding of realism than a movie musical and Parton shows that she can be up to the task.

I love a good screwball comedy and Nine to Five delivers on everything I like about the genre with plenty of fresh ideas to boot. It was entertaining, it made me laugh, it even made me think a little. Honestly, what more could you want out of a movie?

Would Recommend: If you like a good madcap romp of a movie.

Would Not Recommend: If you are concerned the feminist aspects of the comedy will be either too bland or too spicy, depending on your biases.