Mike Judge’s 1999 Office Space was about the miseries of being an employee, at the mercy of dimwitted, petty, officious, passive-aggressive bosses. In his new film Extract, which opens today, the ever fair-minded Judge focuses on the miseries of being a boss, at the mercy of dimwitted, petty, officious, passive-aggressive employees.

Having managed to spend very little of my working life in the cubicle warren, I laughed hard throughout Office Space. But after it was over, The Wife—a lifelong office worker—looked at me grimly & said “That was really well-done, but it wasn’t funny.” Maybe, but she, & plenty of others, have found the movie cathartic—after a poor performance in theatres, it’s gone on to cult status on TV & video.

In his great TV cartoon shows, Beavis and Butthead & King of the Hill—& in his four features as a director—Beavis & Butt-Head Do America, Office Space, Idiocracy & now Extract—Judge’s overriding theme has been, quite simply, stupidity. Stupid, tedious, ill-informed, socially inappropriate people are the majority, he seems to be saying, & in a sense they’re also the lucky ones in our society. They’re comfortable with their stupidity; they don’t find themselves tiresome. After the Adminstration of the last eight years, & our current determination to screw ourselves out of a sensible health care system, it’s sort of hard to argue with him.

What keeps this position from seeming snobbish is that the heroes of Judge’s live-action films aren’t much smarter, & he mocks them just about as stingingly as he does the out-&-out dunces. Ron Livingston in Office Space, Luke Wilson in Idiocracy & now Jason Bateman in Extract are all bland, slow-thinking Everymen, mediocre enough that they have to live among the clods, but just barely smart & reflective & observant enough to allow the clods to drive them crazy.

Judge also has an unusually clear eye on how Americans actually live. His movies play out in the generic, almost featureless nowhere of chain restaurants & bars & apartments & workplaces & subdivisions & hotels & strip malls in which most of us actually spend at least part of our days, & he captures the dreariness that such places can have, the atmosphere of banal shabbiness unrelieved by distinction or character. Most directors want the milieu of their films to be visually interesting, but Judge just tries to get it right, & as a result, his movies are visually interesting.

In Extract, Bateman plays Joel, the owner of a factory that produces food flavoring. He’s a decent fellow who actually developed the product line & built the company, but he’s harried by work hassles, & badly sexually frustrated—if he doesn’t get home in the evening before his listless wife (Kristen Wiig) changes into her sweatpants, his chances with her are shot. He’s also beset by his horrific chatty neighbor (brilliantly played by David Koechner) who waylays him daily while he’s trying to get into his garage with unwelcome invitations to Rotary Club dinners & the like.

General Foods is sniffing around, interested in buying Joel out, & with imbecilic assembly-line workers whose resentments result in workplace mishaps bordering on sabotage, it sounds good to him. But one of his employees (the excellent Clifton Collins, Jr.) is wince-inducingly injured in a freak accident, & a resultant lawsuit throws this deal into uncertainty. Then a sexy new temp worker (Mila Kunis) who seems intrigued by Joel rattles his judgment. He takes some monumentally dumb marital advice from his stoner bartender friend (Ben Affleck), & wacky troubles ensue.

As with Judge’s other films, the plot here isn’t especially strong. It exists mainly as a frame for vignettes in these settings with these characters. All of the actors are riotous, & even when they play intolerable fools & bores & neurotics they don’t lose their warmth. J.K. Simmons has a fine turn as Joel’s lone ally at work with a brain or two in his head, Gene Simmons gets a couple of juicy scenes as a TV lawyer, & Beth Grant is devastatingly dead-on as a self-important, constantly aggrieved assembly-line worker.

Extract is a little poky, & it doesn’t come to much of a climax—there’s no big payoff. But this low-key movie made me laugh harder than I have in a while. There’s a sense in which it just seems to get it right—to show us what our lives are really like, in ways we’re barely aware of (maybe because we don’t seem them depicted this way in other movies & TV shows). If we think that the characters here, or in Judge’s other films & cartoons, are grotesque & hyperbolic exaggerations, I’d say we just aren’t looking closely enough at our neighbors, our coworkers, or ourselves.

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