Movie:  The Temp (1993)

The Temp

Starring Timothy Hutton, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dwight Schultz, Oliver Platt, Steven Weber, Colleen Flynn, and Faye  Dunaway

Directed by Tom Holland

Short Summary:  A temp goes crazy and kills people.

Extended Summary:  In The Temp, Timothy Hutton plays a troubled cookie executive with a lot of tangled, floppy hair, working for the Mrs. Applebee Company, purveyor of fine cookies.  His assistant, Lance, a sloppy, frazzled, stuttering loser, makes bad coffee and keeps things in disarray, but Timothy Hutton lets him work there anyway because he recognizes Lance's potential for being a blatant plot device.  It's a tense, transitional time for the company, for they are unveiling a new line of cookies, and Hutton's radical marketing ideas are shot down by Faye Dunaway, who is slumming it in her role as the CEO of the company.  Other members of the upper cookie echelon include Oliver Platt as a sleazy jerk, and the guy who played Murdock on the A-Team, as another jerk, though not a sleazy one.

Lance departs the office suddenly because his wife is having a baby, leaving Hutton in the lurch during his time of need.

So, Hutton gets a temp.

Lara Flynn Boyle is waiting for him at work the next morning.  She has, of course, cleaned and filed the entire office, apparently without instruction, which in the real world would mean everything was hopelessly lost and misfiled.  But this is a movie, so we accept this, just as we accept that Hutton's neck doesn't snap under the weight of his immense hair without the help of wires and cranes.

With his new temp, Hutton gets to work on an important report on cookie costs and projections.  We launch into a little montage where we see Boyle pretending to type fast, which amounts to her randomly drumming her fingers on the keyboard, never once hitting the spacebar.  On the computer screen, instead of lw;jfoiduvlkahsdvlmnaskjhdfkjashdkfjbkajsdk, which is what should be appearing, we see perfectly formed words and sentences about cookies.  Hutton walks around behind her, showing satisfaction not only at her typing prowess but at her great coffee.  He also takes the opportunity to blatantly look down her top at her breasts.  She slowly turns and catches him looking; he apparently has the reflexes of a glob of dough. Of course, this is the golden age of the early nineties, so she simply smiles as if he's a slightly mischievous child, instead of suing the cookie company for every last chocolate chip.

Boyle then shows her pluck and tenacity by rudely cutting in line at the copier and stealing someone's copy code.  She's a take charge gal, alright, and she barks orders at coworkers and even at her bewildered pervert of a boss.

The report completed and Faye Dunaway pacified, everyone goes to lunch, where it is revealed that Oliver Platt is fatally allergic to wasps, which will be important later when he is stung to death by wasps. 

At a basketball game, Hutton discusses the completive cookie business with the guy from Wings, whose hair is nearly as tangled and floppy as Hutton's.  Hutton also plays with his son, who mechanically delivers his only line all but into the camera.  The guy from Wings works for a rival cookie company, and although they are friends, he threateningly reveals to Hutton that "I take no prisoners and eat the wounded."  There is a dramatic pause as the Wings guy senses his career plummeting even further into obscurity, and then he takes his own life by jumping into a tub with the mechanical boy, electrocuting himself.  Well, he should have, anyway.

Hutton and the guy from Wings discuss the pros & cons of "boning" secretaries, but the guy from Wings thinks he is speaking of Lance, and they share a hearty laugh over the repulsive nature of homosexual sex.

"No, I have a temp," Hutton says, his hair now extremely floppy, floppier than it has been in any previous scene.  "Quite a temp."

"Temps are fair game," the guy from Wings tells him, and you know what?  He's right.  Hutton then says he doesn't want to sleep with his temp because she is married, as is Hutton himself, although he is separated or something. 

Later, Boyle and Hutton work in a romantically lit office.  Boyle comes up with several ideas for the cookie pitch, such as putting hearts on the package to signify a healthy food, and making the jars square so they will take up less shelf-space.  She delivers this information in a desperate, breathy monologue, as if she were realizing just how many more Jews she could have saved from Auschwitz, if only she had sold her car.  "It's a wonderful idea," Hutton whispers through his hair, which has now completely covered his face and now seems to be controlling all his movements.

After seeing the sleazy Oliver Platt hitting on Boyle, Hutton tells her "That guy just wants to get you in the rack", by which I think he means "sack", but maybe they use different terms in the cookie business.  "He just wants to pre-heat your oven, don't you see?  He wants to grease your cookie sheets!"  Lance is coming back to work, and seeing as how the lad is starting a family, Hutton must let his faithful but creepy temp go interview with Platt when Lance returns, despite the fact that she's much more organized and wears skirts that are so short they end several inches above her eyebrows.  This leads to Boyle composing a rhyme for him:

"Peter, Peter, cookie eater, had a temp and couldn't keep her."  I don't know if there was a second verse or not, because I went to the bathroom at this point.

I return in time to see Lance's hand being eaten by a paper shredder.  Hooray!  Now Lara Flynn Boyle can work for Timothy Hutton!  A card for Lance is sent around for everyone to sign, one of the film's few accurate touches, and then Boyle sneakily eavesdrops on a conversation between Hutton and his psychiatrist, learning of Hutton's paranoia and his poor phone-acting abilities.  Hutton soon makes an offhand remark that Boyle should kill Platt, who is in competition with him for a promotion to Chief Executive Cookie Director or something.  The A-team guy yells at someone in another scene that I missed because I was examining a mole on my forearm.

We finally see a cookie in the film, but only for a moment, as another tense scene takes place between Boyle, who somehow has become an expert on the cookie industry, and some other woman who was in another scene that I didn't mention.  Boyle suggests adding molasses to the cookies, which would taste better than the chemical additives that make the cookies taste like molasses.  This is met with harsh opposition from... ah, who cares.  Let's get to some killing!

While driving to work, Hutton spots Platt's car blocking traffic, and instead of repeatedly honking his horn and swearing profusely, he actually pulls over to see what is the matter.  Platt is dead, and we are afforded a tight close-up of a wasp crawling from between his full, womany lips.

Boyle begins dressing like a prostitute and exhibiting signs of derangement, such as buying jewelry with Hutton's money, messing with his lunch calendar, and obsessing over him in general, even stating that she only exists to do a good job for him.  Huh.  Doesn't sound like any temp I know.  Hutton fires her, but she tells him she's become the marketing manager due to her molasses idea, which had somehow never occurred to the skilled scientists who develop foods for a living.  As a parting gift, she gives Hutton a letter opener that looks suspiciously like a HUGE DEADLY DAGGER.

Later, there is a sampling of the new cookies in a local grocery store.  I assume its local, anyway; there was no scene where everyone boarded a jet for The United Arab Emerates with a sack of cookies.  The cookies, which cause profuse mouth bleeding from the old woman who eats one, do not go over well with the general public, who (generally) don't enjoy chewing on glass.  Maybe they should have tested the cookies on carnies first.  Cut to Faye Dunaway walking quickly down a hallway, barking orders to the crowd following her in your standard damage control scene.  Boyle is assigned to talk to the press, since she is pretty, but when she appears on television she is wearing enormous, frightening Elton John glasses, obliterating her good looks and causing small children, and this reviewer, to burst into horrified tears.

There is a company picnic, where several people discuss Boyle and speculate on why her family is never seen, yet strangely, no one mentions that you can see her entire ASS in the microscopic shorts she is wearing.  Later, she and the A-Team guy argue in front of everyone about the proliferation of obvious foreshadowing in poorly written suspense films.

Naturally, Hutton finds find the A-Team guy dead of an apparent suicide: he has force fed himself cookies until his stomach burst.  Actually, he was found hanging from his neck, but I like my idea better, it's more like Seven, a cool movie that I'd rather be watching.

Anyway, Hutton and the Wings guy then play one-on-one basketball, as all buddies do in movie like this, so no one notices how crappy their dialogue is, distracted instead by how crappy they are at basketball. 

Hutton begins to freak out, staring suspiciously at everyone and sneaking around the office at night, his absurdly tangled hair hissing and coiling around his head. He even calls the temp agency to complain about Boyle, and they immediately assume she has hygiene problems, as if this is a common occurrence with temps.  This is supposed to be funny, but I, for one, was not amused.  My hygiene is not a problem, its a challenge.  Okay???

Some more stuff happens while I take a quick shower, and when I return, Hutton is being hit in the arm with a baseball bat by a bald man.  Some cookie dispute, I gather.

Speaking of cookies, Hutton is confronted by Dunaway because he has the recipe for some one of their important new cookies in his files.  When he asks which recipe it is, Dunaway growls "Chewy... Almond...", perhaps angered by the fact that she used to make movies like Chinatown and Network.  Hutton snaps, perhaps remembering that he was in Ordinary People, and accuses Boyle, who has never been in any good movies, of killing someone named Ted, who I don't even remember being in this movie.  He's confused, I'm confused, the cookies are confused.

In a bar, a black man appears in the picture long enough to start a fight with Hutton, who kicks his ass until another white man, showing true bravery,  grabs him by the hair and throws him outside into the rain with the guy from Wings.  He lies in a pile of trash for about ten minutes, until the Wings guy finally remembers his line.  A lot of wet, stringy hair flops around while dialogue like "You're losin' it!" and "What's the matter with you!" are screamed.

The action picks up a bit, probably because I am fast-forwarding the tape, and Hutton somehow gets a promotion to Vice-President.  Then some stuff happens, and he is in the cookie factory, which is dimly lit and replete with dangerous catwalks and hissing vents.  There is a dead guard, killed with Hutton's letter opener, the one that looks like a DEADLY STABBING WEAPON.  Hutton reacts to this horrible sight by saying "Gah."  We are treated to a lame attempt of a surprise ending, wherein we are supposed to wonder if maybe Faye Dunaway is responsible for all the deaths, rather than Lara Flynn Boyle.  We are confused and we have many questions such as "Why am I watching this film?" and "Am I this desperate for website material?"

Finally, Hutton is struck in the hair with a steel pipe (although I suspect Jeff Bridges' hair stood in as a stunt double).  He falls to the floor, and then the exciting climax occurs.

WARNING: SPOILER

The climax sucks.

In the end, Dunaway dies in a fall and Hutton avenges the deaths of the 46 deceased cookie factory employees by firing Boyle.

Thoughts:  This movie sucked, and not just because it sucked.  From a temping point of view, it left a lot to be desired.  Where was the scene where Boyle talks to Human Resources about her benefits package and vacation time?  When did she watch the poorly made video about the history of the cookie factory during the obligatory orientation?  Did she get the salary she asked for?  Did they give her a parking spot?  They never showed her temp agency calling to discuss the position, nor the conversation between the agency and H.R., negotiating their finders fee.  It's these sorts of details that, I feel, could have definitely added to the running time of this picture.

Scoring:  I'd give this movie 1 1/2 desks, but I think that's a really lame scoring system.

Back