Wednesday, November 3, 2010 at 6:30PM Movie Review: 'The Company Men'
| The Company Men (Releases December 10th) Starring Ben Afleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Kevin Costner
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Ah, Corporate America. How far ye have fallen. In John Wells' The Company Men, we witness that downfall first hand, through several different perspectives, and several different consequences.
We open in 2008, at the brink of the global financial crisis, and Bobby Walker is at the top of his game. Walker, as played by Ben Affleck, is an overconfident sales whiz; he plays golf, drives a Porsche, and he's never home, but that's a days work at Boston's GTX, the transportation conglomerate that cuts his checks. He's breathing easy, until the dam bursts and he's downsized along with most of his division. Thus Bobby Walker suddenly becomes our Corporate Everyman. He's got an MBA, but what good is it to him now when there is no job market for men like him?
Bobby must learn to survive his loss, and give hope to those who've collapsed along with him, despite his unwillingness to accept the finality of his newfound poverty. Afleck manages to maintain Bobby’s inability to accept the change in his circumstances, even when he’s musing to his wife about his predicament. He says, “I’m playing golf at the club and in a few weeks I won’t be able to support my family." It's this nonchalant disbelief in his situation that brands him as the typical result of downsizing in America. Rosemarie DeWitt, as Bobby's wife, Maggie Walker, is the voice of practicality to Bobby’s denial but, unfortunately, it’s distracting to hear Dewitt’s attempt at a Bostonian accent. For both her and Kevin Costner, as her blue-collar brother, to affect a South Boston intonation and do it so unconvincingly makes it seem like writer/director John Wells is attempting to brand Company Men as a “Boston” film in the vein of The Town with little success or purpose.
The Company Men: suits, ties, and temp agencies.
While Bobby's progression is certainly the major focus of the film, Wells also depicts Tommy Lee Jones as Gene McClary, the head of his own division at GTX and a life-long friend and employee of owner James Salinger (a viscerally cold-hearted Craig T. Nelson.) Gene has a sense of survivor's guilt after the downsizing, not for his financial security despite the loss of his own position, but for the ethical concerns over laying-off those like Bobby, who, in a white-collar sort of way, are less fortunate than he is. His initial reaction is to remove himself from a position of accountability. Yet, without delving into Bobby's career with GTX and Gene's own experiences, it's hard to understand why McClary takes such pity on his former subordinates. Jones, with those sad, sunken eyes of his, carries a seemingly misplaced warmth that is not touched on nearly enough in the film.
For a third persepctive, we have Chris Cooper as Phil Woodward, a company man through-and-through, who came up from ship-building on the Boston docks to a prime position on the GTX heirarchy. His spiral into despair is the most moving storyline of the trio. There's little need to note what a fine actor Cooper is; he carries so much emotion in his face, it's as if he doesn't need to speak. Phil's descent is disturbing and all too close to reality; at this point in the film, Company Men may as well be a horror movie, because, well, this is happening, even now.
Wells' first go at directing (he's a former writer for both "ER" and "The West Wing", amongst others) leads to some interesting stylistic choices; he often seats two characters side-by-side, craning their necks to address each other as if they are playing to a stage audience. However, a single shot of Cooper standing alone in an empty office conveys more than any dialogue, and shows that his abilities can only improve with time. As such, his promise of what's to come and his skills as a writer far outweigh any failure in stylistic composition.
Company Men succeeds mostly on its timeliness and the strong performances of its lead actors. Were the country not currently suffering under these conditions, it's likely the film would fail to affect audiences in the way it most certainly will. Yet, as we struggle to overcome the recession, we can look here to see three possible outcomes from its wake: we can allow our situation to devour us, avoid its consequences, or simply learn to cope and survive. Wells has given us a snapshot of three men in decline; men who could be you, your husbands, your fathers. For him, and hopefully for his audience, it's not just about what happens when the world plummets from under a man, it's how he rises up or falls away in its wake.
The Company Men hits theaters on 10th Decmeber, 2010.
Reader Comments (17)
Overall an ok movie didn't care for Costner's accent, however that is the least of this flick's problems. It could've used a re-write or 2 I do like the premise of what a company does to its employees when their given pink slips. Unfortanetly at times it felt like a bunch of scenes cobbled together to try and make sense. The ambiiton was there, it could've used a little more tightening in the script. I went mainly for the cast.
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