(Mmmm...Clooney)
The Company Men is set in Boston, during the fall of 2008, when the financial markets all fell down and the best minds of corporate America tried to put Humpty Dumpty back together again by getting rid of all their employees, who apparently were interfering with their profit margins. It's about men getting laid off from really, really high-paying jobs and having to cope with downgrading from their Mc- and actual mansions, which are stuffed with stuff. Some of these guys are old and actually knew how to do things with their hands once-upon-a-time, and are played with appropriate gravitas by Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper. Some of them are arrogant dickwads with MBAs who, in their late 30s, will finally have to grow-the-fuck-up and are played by Ben Affleck, an actor who arouses an instant schadenfreude in me.
Sadly, a large part of the story centers on Affleck's character, Bobby Walker, who is a two-dimensional, textbook study of how people react to these things. It's the classic Kübler-Ross model, commonly known as the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In Bobby, this translates as 18-hole delusion, snark, whining to his mortgage company over the phone, losing his Porsche, and having to go actually work, for his [gasp] working class brother-in-law (then, at the end, getting a fairy godfather reprieve of sorts -- more on this later). Bobby's wife, Maggie (played by Rosemarie DeWitt), returns to work as a nurse (nice breadwinning skills to fall back on), so I can only assume that she must be able to tap into some Nurse Jackie-level meds that enable her to put up with Bobby's behavior with the saintly acceptance she gives him. (I can't help thinking that if Maggie was a real-life New Englander with working class roots, she would have given him the beat-down he deserves: see The Fighter.)
Tommy Lee Jones plays Gene McClary, the number two guy at the company, which is run by his best friend and former college roommate (we learn at an expositional testimonial dinner), James Salinger, played with appropriate blankness by Craig T. Nelson. TLJ gets the millionaire-with-a-conscience role, conflicted about sugar-coating the stock value, upset that underlings are being trimmed from the roster, sometimes -- gasp -- talking back to the CEO. He's got a wife back home at the manse who wants to take the corporate jet down to Palm Beach for a shopping weekend, but old Gene's banging the hot HR lady, Sally Wilcox, who's laying off more than she can chew (Maria Bello). When Gene gets his walking papers, he walks them over to Sally's place for a little late-mid-life shack up.
Chris Cooper plays Phil Woodward, a 60-year-old who worked his way up from ship-welding to constructing a white-collar gilded cage that houses a realistically frumpy, headachy wife and a teenaged daughter whose senior trip is going to Italy (on Cooper's face, you can see the cost being tallied in Phil's weary head). Laid off, he gets to endure a banal resume review by the overly familiar, up-with-people harpy at the outplacement center, another moment Cooper nails with minimal dialogue. (Of the three leads, Cooper's character is both the least-written and the most satisfying. The man knows how to make silence matter.)
Kevin Costner pops up as Jack Dolan, Bobby's contractor brother-in-law who regularly taunts Bobby about his paper-pushing uselessness but makes a Bobby an initially-rebuffed job offer after one of the adorable kids lets it be known at Thanksgiving that her daddy is unemployed. (News flash: the cute Kevin Costner has left the planet. He has thickened in body, and now sports hair akin to glued-on ginger pubes.)
So Bobby gets to make new pals at his outplacement center (they even play touch-football together!), and doubles-down on the humble pie, moving his family into his parent's house after the McMansion goes bye-bye, and schlepping buckets of cement for Jack. He goes to a Hail-Mary job interview in Chicago, only to have gotten the date wrong (d'oh!) and now is too poor to fly back the following week. Lucky for him, rich old Gene decides to start a consulting firm and hires Bobby to help restart a shipping yard in Gloucester (because yeah, that could happen). It pays $80,000 a year, half his original salary but, by golly, he might just make it after all. On $80,000 a year.
Luckily for John Wells, both Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper are excellent actors who can breathe life into clichéd characters. Their scenes are the ones that make The Company Men worth watching. The rest of it has a generic feel, and despite the presence of Roger Deakins as cinematographer, the film has little in the way of visual flair. It's kind of like a really long, middlebrow network TV episode. Lifetime Television for Male Menopause -- complete with tenuous relation to "real-life" events.
But where's the beef? The outrage? The actual financial events in this movie are often literally going on as noise in the background -- on TV, the box of John Wells' power (most of which manifests itself in the role of producer. not writer/director). Few things in cinema piss me off more than bad movies about important subjects, because they get graded on a curve. For instance, Gandi -- great guy, Gandi -- overrated, bloated film. The Company Men ends with the lead's problem solved in a deus ex machina manner -- while millions of Americans continue to live day-by-day in a "jobless recovery," the oxymoronic elephant in the room, -- that it really makes me mad that I wasted two hours of my underpaid, underemployed life on it.
Skip The Company Men and see Charles Ferguson's intellectually rigorous and righteously angering Inside Job instead. It's still playing theatrically, and comes out on DVD in March. You won't be sorry -- and maybe if enough of us peons get angry, the powers that be will be. (Hey -- you have your fantasies, I have mine.)
i have some "beef" with this. i like how you described the plot and the characters. however, i saw the ending as a great metaphor. however, "unrealistic" it came across to you, the message to me was one of "each one of us has to start anew, from the ground up, to create something we can see (as tommy lee jones says earlier in the movie) and the image of the lone docks leading to the big ship being pulled by the tug boat". It may not be a realistic ending for each of us (a friend letting us work for him), but it's not entirely impossible. And again the idea of working with the resources you've got. Plus Affleck's character was willing to stay on as a carpenter indicates he had taken a large slice out of humble pie. And less we not forget Cooper's fate. What happens to each of us is different. As for the "beef, outtrage" and financial noise, well that's exactly how it's been for most of us, noise in background of our lives as we try to get by day to day. Although the quality of the film and screenplay may have been middlebrown, it still was a worthwhile depiction of the times we live in.
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