Career Opportunities (1991)

Career Opportunities arrives from 1991 with the serene confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is and has no intention of being anything else. John Hughes wrote and co-produced it, Bryan Gordon directed it, and Frank Whaley plays a small-town liar who takes a night janitor job at Target and winds up locked inside with an heiress played by Jennifer Connelly. The premise is a bottle episode under fluorescent lighting. Two people talk. A store hums. That is the entire architecture.

The film's handling of Josie McClellan is where any modern accounting gets interesting, and not in the film's favor. She flees an abusive father. She seduces a burglar and steals his getaway car, which is genuine initiative. Yet the camera regards her as a prize, a dream girl deposited in a dressing room for the protagonist's benefit. The promotional trailer, which posed Connelly astride a kiddie riding horse, tells you which audience the studio had in mind. There is agency here, but it is agency in service of a fantasy.

Elsewhere the ledger sits nearly empty. The cast is white, the town is white, and the screenplay has no interest in commenting on that or on anything else. The Target setting is a playground, not an argument about consumption or labor. No character carries a diagnosis, a cause, or a grievance the story feels obliged to dignify. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns a lesson about society. The wealthy heiress is a romantic object, not a target of class anger, and the two burglars are slapstick. The picture earned eleven million dollars, reviewed poorly, and was disowned by its own writer, who called it cheap and vulgar. Three decades on it persists as a curio: a lightweight romance with attractive leads, a decent soundtrack, and almost no ideological footprint whatsoever. A thin vintage, poured into a glass that never asked for more.