The Business of Strangers



She’s the boss: Stockard Channing in The Business of Strangers.

Julie (Stockard Channing) is good at her job. She’s spent years climbing the corporate ladder, equally adept at making faultless presentations and schmoozing with assholes. And yet, Julie remains unsure of herself; when, en route to an important pitch meeting, she learns that her boss is flying in for an unscheduled one-on-one, she imagines that she’s about to be fired. As Julie click-clicks through a starkly white airport, Teo Maniaci’s camera tracks behind her, then moves around to reveal her game face: prepared and in control.

Minutes later, things start to go wrong. Julie can’t get info on this upcoming meeting with the boss, then her presentation goes badly because her new assistant, Paula (Julia Stiles), arrives 45 minutes late, PowerPoint equipment in tow. When Paula calls her "über-frau," Julie takes aim: In a fit of frustration and fear, she fires the girl.

And then everything changes: The meeting in a sterile airport cafe results in Julie’s promotion to CEO. That she has misinterpreted the situation so colossally probably says less about Julie than the brutal business world she inhabits, but still, it sets her up for what follows — namely, Paula’s increasingly complicated vengeance plot, which seems part ferocious spite, part meticulous calculation, and part arty concoction designed to show off acting chops. But while The Business of Strangers does make some room for Channing and Stiles to stretch out, its basic premise — the meanness of the business of strangers — is worn out.

The plot isn’t wholly predictable. When the women meet again in the hotel bar, they bond over a few drinks and their shared anger at being pawns in a men’s game, then exorcise their fury against a smarmy headhunter, Nick (Frederick Weller). But Julie and Paula don’t have much to say to each other that’s new; locked in mutual melodrama, they eventually reveal self-incriminating and self-destructive bitterness. Julie is burdened with the usual motivations. She’s divorced, childless (she didn’t want them, which apparently marks her as un-warm, or perhaps un-generous, in the film’s emotional economy), hard-drinking, and, no surprise, lonely. Paula, still young and rebellious (at least in her own mind), is not as immersed in corporate culture, but she’s a natural, both enraged and wily enough to hold her own against anyone in that sphere.

Full of as-yet-unfocused cruelty, Paula becomes an object lesson for Julie, who is, in the midst of her supposed triumph, looking for a reason not to live the life she’s living. Or more precisely, she’s looking for a way to test herself, now that she’s found that her own judgment is so disastrously defective. Coming across Paula later that evening in the hotel bar, Julie feels guilty and buys her a drink, then offers to put Paula up in the hotel with her company card. On their way down to the pool in the elevator, the women find themselves surrounded by men in suits: Paula starts a game, apologizing to Julie for "… you know." As the guys eye them, Paula sighs, "I just wasn’t in the mood." Julie takes the challenge, suggesting Paula’s racist because she was afraid of the black dildo. Ding: arriving at their floor, the women exit, pleased that they’ve so easily titillated these foolish men.

From here, the movie traces their ongoing bonding process until Paula, absent briefly for an unsatisfying make-out session with some anonymous creep, returns to their table to find Julie flirting with Nick. Here the movie abandons potential complexities for stereotypes. The women retire to Julie’s room, where Paula accuses Nick of date-raping a friend of hers back in college. When he shows up at the door, drunk and stupid, they women decide to teach him something, though they’re not sure what. Paula administers a knockout dose of Julie’s Valium, which leaves Nick available for some vague violations. Mostly, though, the rest of the film concerns the women interacting over his comatose body. They’re canny enough to move him out of Julie’s room before they do anything, dragging him to a section of the hotel that is — so symbolically — under construction. Surrounded by tarps and unfinished boards, Julie and Paula strip him to his boxers, then write nasty words on him while pressing each other’s buttons: Julie accuses Paula of being privileged and apathetic, Paula accuses Julie of being a lonely old lady; Paula dares Julie to touch Nick’s dick and then, to kiss her. Ooooh.

None of this all-night exchange is so foul as the movie seems to think, though Nick’s unconsciousness through it all is a nice touch; he’s an emblem of what ails the women, but also ragingly irrelevant. Paula’s apparent insight about women in business — "We express issue of doubt and control differently" — ends up lost: these women reflect the men they despise and envy. The Business of Strangers doesn’t press on to any of the more dangerous questions it hints at. Paula’s performance never reveals anything you don’t presume about her, and Julie learns what you think she will.

(Ritz at the Bourse; Ritz Five; Ritz 16)