As far as I’m concerned, the great mystery of “Office Romance,” the romantic comedy that premiered on Netflix over the weekend, is not how many whales donated their placentas so Lopez could look 30 at age 56. It is how, in the name of every British ghost, the people who gave Apple TV “Ted Lasso” — namely Brett Goldstein and Joe Kelly — managed to create such a bad, lazy and formulaic romantic comedy the moment they set foot in the halls of Netflix. Both have said in interviews that they felt frustrated by how long it had been since they had seen a good romantic comedy, so they decided to make one. I am still waiting.
Jennifer Lopez plays Jackie Cruz, the CEO — how empowering! — of an airline. Goldstein, aka Roy Kent, the bitter, introverted footballer with a heart of gold from “Ted Lasso,” is now Daniel Blanchflower, the company’s new lawyer. He is very British: accent, fondness for soccer and a tendency to curse three times a minute. She is American to her core. Goldstein and Kelly did not even treat us to a hostility-that-turns-into-burning-attraction dynamic, going instead straight for love at first or second sight. And that’s it. We are supposed to believe they are now in love, even though there is nothing connecting them.
The only obstacle in their way is — it doesn’t get more Gen Z than this — the company’s HR policy banning intimate relationships between employees. That is not the last absurdity the film asks its viewers to accept. Later we also get Jennifer Lopez flying a plane, a room in Lopez’s apartment filled with “British things” and her loyal assistant, played by the perfect Betty Gilpin of “Nurse Jackie” and “Mrs. Davis,” giving birth on an office desk and coming back to work the next day. Enough, my good men. There is a limit to the suspension of disbelief I am capable of, despite every desire to surrender to your ground-zero comedy.
Sorry, but what worked in Apple TV’s ensemble comedy crashes on the rocks of Netflix’s algorithm when Kelly and Goldstein try to take another spin through British roughness versus American slickness, only this time in a nearly two-hour movie — far too long for a film with very little in it. The problem is that the British romantic comedy rests on completely different motifs from the American version of the genre.
“Notting Hill,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and other British classics run on engines of embarrassment, restraint, verbal humor and self-awareness. The American rom-com, and Jennifer Lopez — the queen of the genre, for whom and only for whom the role in “Office Romance” was written — takes itself very seriously, sends its heroes on an emotional journey and gives them grand declarations and kitsch to recite. You can understand why Goldstein and Kelly wanted to preserve the British rough edge and blunt comic tone, but in practice that means that into the unjustified sea of saccharine that is “Office Romance,” the film occasionally parachutes crude jokes about erections, discussions of the word “cunt,” masturbation, bodily fluids and a birth scene that is far, far too graphic for a Saturday morning.
All of that is nice and fine, and even funny once in a while, but no one goes into a romantic comedy for the occasional chuckle. A romantic comedy is an unwritten contract between the creator and the viewer, under which one side agrees to ignore ridiculous coincidences, misunderstandings that could have been solved with a WhatsApp message and the fact that planes always take off on time. In return, we are promised two protagonists with captivating, genuine chemistry, who get to know each other, gradually fall in love and ultimately overcome some reasonable obstacle preventing them from being together. There is a formula, but it is built believably, and there is a delicate dance on the way to love. True, Jennifer Lopez in a bikini — stunning — is a good reason, but, well, not good enough.
We are moved because we understand the small or large change they need to make in order to be together. That is the one element that, by the terms of the contract, needs to be interesting, complex and real. It is the only necessary logic; as far as I’m concerned, everything else can take place in the fairy kingdom. Somehow, Kelly and Goldstein completely missed that part. I do not care that Daniel and Jackie travel for some business/whatever pretext to the Dominican Republic and eat dinner on the beach if it happens two minutes after they meet. And while we are on the subject of credibility, Gilpin, the least you can do with a fake ninth-month pregnancy belly is pretend you are pregnant.
Lopez and Goldstein actually do a decent job in acting terms, but if you love the pleasant feeling of surrendering to someone else’s romance, it is doubtful “Office Romance” will give you that little flutter in your stomach and pull you in with it. There are too many clichés in the dialogue, too much Judd Apatow-style humor — not that there is anything wrong with that, just not in this kind of comedy — around the dinner table and, above all, too little love for a genre whose great strength is falling in love.