Business of Strangers
The “Business of Strangers” is a day-in-the-life type movie about Julie Styron (Stockard Channing). Julie is an on the go, cell phone talking, presentation giving wheeled suitcase using business woman. It’s not altogether clear what that business is, but that doesn’t really matter. All we need to know is that she’s super powerful, super busy, super efficient, and super insecure. When she finds out her boss is flying in to meet her for dinner, she immediately takes this unprecedented event as a bad sign. Soon she has herself convinced that she going to be fired. In a tricky little show of power combined with lack of confidence, Julie arranges for a corporate head hunter to fly and meet her to work on finding a replacement for the job she hasn’t lost yet.
In the midst of this super woman’s day, she finds time to blithely humiliate and fire Paula (Julia Stiles), a tech assistant whose late flight caused her to miss a presentation. Paula essentially flips Julie off as Julie makes yet another cell phone call to check the office gossip on her status.
Well, as it turns out, Julie is not fired, but offered the CEO position at her company. We can’t tell whether this is good news to her or not, although based on her previous behavior she should be dancing in the streets.
Julie ends up spending the night in a nearby hotel, where, coincidentally, both Paula and the head hunter have also turned up. Coincidence is an amazing thing! Basically stunned stupid by her promotion, Julie approaches Paula with apologies, drinks, and an offer to reinstate the girl.
Paula is clearly still miffed, or perhaps chronically miffed. Regardless, Julie seems intent on befriending her, the implication being that she has no one else in her life to “share” with, so she chooses this young, surly, complete stranger.
The two women then become nearly instant buddies, sharing secrets, playing little games and all that kinda gal-pal stuff that occurs exclusively in film montages. Throughout these scenes, Paula is sending off huge green clouds of general weirdness, but business mogul Julie seems unconcerned. The movie seems intent on these two being soul mates perhaps to prove Julie is so desperately needy.
At this point in the movie, Paula begins to indulge in out in the open less than wholesome behavior, all tolerated by Julie.
The head hunter arrives back on the scene eventually, after all three are good and drunk, and Paula instantly stalks away after seeing her new pal laughing with this acquaintance. Julie, of course, follows her new pal and hears a very disturbing tale which angers her, and puts her once again in the control of the manipulative Paula.
What follows is a mind boggling series of events (I won’t give it all away) that has Paula pushing buttons, and Julie mindlessly, spinelessly obeying. These “tense” moments are followed by a strange, contemplative ending.
This movie has some major flaws, all stemming from the mother of all flaws. In any movie, it would seem, the main character needs to have some base level of competency, be it high or low, and maintain that unless we are given compelling reasons for a change. In this case, Julie begins as a seriously competent, very successful, clearly highly regarded professional and becomes, for lack of a better term, a blithering idiot. Her shock at being promoted and her questions about the life she’s chosen are just not enough impetus to make her so stupid. Paula is very clearly trouble from word one, and any competent soon-to-be CEO would have been pleasantly kind and then excused herself. That would have made for a very short movie, however, so Julie apparently loses her sanity, morality and judgement after being dazzled by this budding sociopath.
Perhaps the movie wants us to believe that highly successful women who make non-traditional choices are so lonely, bitter and screwed up that they can’t help being lured into this kind of ridiculous mess. Insulting, at best.
There is also a lack of character development across the board. We get no explanation for Julie’s endless string of bad choices in dealing with Paula, nor do we ever get to know anything at all about Paula. We don’t even really get to know if Paula has told Julie anything at all resembling the truth at any point. The headhunter character only seems to exist to give Paula more chances to be odd, and Julie more chances to be stupid. As a result, the characters all ring untrue, unbelievable, and incredibly over the top.
I have always liked Stockard Channing, but I’m not sure why. Perhaps an adolescent nostalgia for the movie version of “Grease”, perhaps she just has a cool name. Whatever it is, I do think she did a fairly good job with really lame material, and Julia Stiles is occasionally very creepy as Paula. This is not, however, in any way enough to save this movie. I think I’ll go back to watching Stockard Channing on “The West Wing”.
