REVIEW: The Company Men Offers a Rare Portrait of the Working -- and the Nonworking -- World

Movieline Score: 9

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The Company Men is Wells' feature movie debut; he also wrote the script. Wells has worked mostly as a producer and writer, and he was also the creator of E.R. (He was also the guy behind the short-lived, and great, TV series Smith, with Ray Liotta.) His background in TV may explain why The Company Men is so straightforward and accessible in its approach -- and why it's so adult -- without being at all ham-fisted. Wells works hard to capture the texture of these men's lives, in both their working and nonworking modes. Affleck's Bobby is the heart of the movie, and the one who struggles hardest to adjust to his unfortunate circumstances. His wife, Maggie (played by a rock-solid Rosemarie DeWitt), takes the news of his layoff matter-of-factly, immediately sitting down to draw up a budget for the couple and their two children. It's Bobby who's in denial: He figures he'll land another job in a few weeks, and hopes to keep his circumstances a secret until that happens.

His cover is blown pretty quickly, and when his contractor brother-in-law, Jack (Kevin Costner, superb and amazingly laid-back in this supporting role), offers him temporary work, he waves it away. At the useless job-placement center his company has signed him up for, he meets a fellow displaced worker, an engineer with a doctorate named Danny (played by Eamonn Walker, a marvelous actor who's previously played Howlin' Wolf, in Darnell Martin's Cadillac Records, and a charismatic shaman in Carroll Ballard's lovely, underappreciated Duma). With his M.B.A., Bobby is sure he'll blow out of there in a few weeks; he unintentionally insults Danny, who's been kicking around the joint for months, his doctorate notwithstanding.

Weeks turn into months, and ultimately, Bobby has to make some rough compromises. Wells shows the passage of time deftly, conveying the monotony of joblessness without making his movie monotonous -- we see Bobby checking in, day after day, at that job center, learning to roll with the ridiculous routine of it, just as his fellow dejectees do. At one point, he stares out the window of his large, comfortable family home at the snowstorm outside; the whistling wind sounds particularly ominous, suggesting not just nature's anger, but the very coldness of the job gods, who seem to have forsaken him. (The DP here is Roger Deakins, who's terrific at giving scenes of real-life, everyday living just the right amount of polish.)

Over the years Affleck has become a sturdy, reliable actor. He doesn't overplay Bobby's increasing frustration, not even in the wrenching moment when he learns that his teenage son has voluntarily given up his Xbox, knowing the family can't afford it. In real life, Affleck has proved to be a pretty thoughtful guy. (Not every jamoke can get an op-ed piece published in the New York Times.) Luckily, he doesn't overthink his acting: Everything he does is natural and believable rather than overstudied. Affleck is particularly good at peeling back the layers of masculine code to reveal the vulnerability that lies beneath them. And there's just something gratifying about watching a performer with such old-time movie-actor good looks playing a regular guy with modern problems.

Wells touches on so many problems of the modern workplace, as it's affected by corporate greed and thoughtlessness, that it's almost a wonder The Company Men is as entertaining as it is. Even the movie's most predictable moment -- and its biggest misstep -- is handled quickly and discreetly, with a minimum of creaky melodrama. The movie certainly faces a downer of a subject head-on. But in the end, it's simply about being resilient in crappy times. And that's something many of our parents and grandparents knew something about, even though each generation thinks its problems are original and unique.

Wells is particularly astute about the fact that we now have a country, and a work culture, where nobody makes anything anymore. Jones' Gene McClary is a businessman who's failed his employees -- he seems to be carrying all his sorrow in the saggy pockets under his eyes. At one point takes the still-unemployed Bobby on a tour of one of the company's old ship-building facilities, which was closed long ago. His voice echoes through the vast, haunted space as he describes the everyday work that used to happen there. "We used to make something here," he tells Bobby, explaining that the business gave work to some 6,000 men, who could then buy houses, raise families, send their kids to college. "They were building something they could see -- not just figures on a balance sheet, but a ship... These men knew their worth. They knew who they were."

That's movie language, of course, a filmmaker's using a character to get some loud, basic ideas across. But when was the last time you heard such a thing in a movie? The Company Men ends with a small sprig of hope, a character coming up with an idea and saying, with excitement but also the proper amount of apprehensiveness, "I think there's a business here." The Company Men is about the heart of entrepreneurship (now there's a movie subject for you), about the notion of building on an idea, of betting on everything people have to offer in the workplace, instead of just moving dollars around for personal gain. Some of us may have come to think that nobody believes in that kind of business-world idealism anymore. Thank God that every once in a while, there's a filmmaker to step in and say the obvious.

(This review was originally published Dec. 10, 2010, for The Company Men's limited release.)

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Comments

  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston says:

    Cautionary note: people who like the idea of being persevering, generally ensure they end up living in an environment that shortchanges them. You take the current lot of American humanity, in their hunt for adultness / penance in self-sacrifice, small hopes, and hardship, and provide them magically with instead their every dream come true, they would hate you to the point of wanting to kill you for giving them way beyond what they're prepared to accept -- for adorning them after they've finally near-sheared the most compromising parts of themselves off. So instead, a future of a first long bleakness; then some bits of New Deal solace amidst the shared suffering, the untended to, valid complaints of indifferent, resistant, ongoing corporate culture; until some massive sacrificial war permits a later generation to the moving-beyond actually involved in growing up. ("You can never outdistance your ancestors" -- I look forward to all the "growth" that'll follow that thought / inclination.) The challenge now is to make sure we don't too-fast race into the depression mind-set -- getting "there" before it too much settles in, would suggest it might just be following our lead.

  • Tamar says:

    Your fancy prose misses the point entirely. Most Americans are simply struggling with being poorer than they'd like to be, and it has nothing to with a "hunt for adultness / penance in self-sacrifice, small hopes, and hardship." And please, no one would kill you for making their dreams come true because they're some sort of scarred animal in a cage. Remember: it's the economy, stupid.

  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston says:

    I hear your point, but to me, people get the economy they actually want. If they truly feel they deserve (have earned), if they truly want, happiness, you get the like of the 30 years of on and on growth that was 1950 to 1980. Nothing could put a stop to it; not corporations, late capitalism -- run-amock, widespread greed -- terrestrial limits, Celestial scorn, ancestors-all-in-disapproval -- nothing. However, if what they want is to be "Americans simply struggling with being poorer than they'd like to be," to be some (idiotic) generation that renewed all the "ennobling," "necessary" sacrifices their grandparents were stupefied (and stupided) by, who could believe themselves truly desiring of better, ONLY given there being little chance any such would befall them, then nothing could stop it either. If aliens landed on the earth right now and forced endless bunches of riches into everyone's pockets, we're very near the point where we spoiled Americans would monk and monastery ourselves before the abundance. If they took that away, and forced us forever into 5-star accommodations, then we'd deem virtual reality the "truer" one, and absolutely refuse to forego the Xbox so we could reify (yes, maybe even the likes of snobbish "I don't own a TV" critics) the likes of "Fallout 3," until the even-more-appropriate "Penance 2morrow" could be made. If they took that away, then we'd slowly go insane, depriving, UGLIFYING ourselves near to the point of hacking off our own limbs -- even if that 5-star, top-of-the-line refrigerator couldn't be managed to be appropriately-tumbled to provide some unlikely-but-maybe-still-possibly? excuse
    ... unless of course they yet somehow proved killable, then, yes, we would kill them, for feeding us abundance when what we want is hardening through suffering, for drawing out our deepest, and truly regrettable, wishes, and forcing us to catch some sight of them. The zombified of the 1930s weren't perseverers; they were (in greater truth) grotesque willers of their own penance-born deterioration. Some (the interesting) mocked their own back then -- that is until everyone was about ennobling. Let's start with that, and see where it gets us -- I don't want a rehash of the 1930s/40s, even if it did end up serving out "adult" dishes of grace and wit, in film, in art, that apparently no critic seems to see the main drawback to (that it was always born out of and remained true to an ethos of compensation, not really enrichment).

  • SunnydaZe says:

    Most of us have the hard choice between time or money. With money you have comfort which you can't enjoy because you are at work all the time... With time you have no comfort because the fuse has been lit and the bomb will go off at any minute, but you do get odd moments of true freedom before the sh*t hits the fan.
    God did not decide this is the way things should be. Jesus doesn't want you to pay rent nor does Mohammad respect you for all of your hard work. This system was created by humanity and humanity VOLUNTEERS to work with-in.
    The bottom has dropped out leaving people who work at Wal-mart paying money to eat at Red Lobster so the people who work at Red Lobster can afford to shop at Wal-mart.
    The only real change will occur when enough people say, "I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" Thru out history this is known as REVOLUTION. And sometimes, this point of action succeeds in evoking positive change. Many times it just cuts off the head of one beast and replaces it with another more or less terrible entity.
    But when things have gone as far as they can go, and things have gotten as bad as they can get> Is it worth the risk?
    Gandhi once said, "10,0000 Englishmen simply cannot control 350 million Indians, if those Indians refuse to cooperate."
    This has become us and our corporate masters.
    Question is> What are you going to do?

  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston says:

    I disagree. When people are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore! they do the likes of chopping off leaders' heads -- along with those of anyone even remotely connected to them, until numbers pile up beyond number, and even your best friend begins to seem suspicious. Only AFTER bodies of both sides lie everywhere, now so much seeming more born of the same purpose than foes of opposite stripe, only AFTER people have begun to forget the point of it all, but still gauge that surely some awful blood price has more than fully been repaid, does society move ahead -- rock and roll, flower power, and even soldier mockery. Revolutionaries mostly want to sacrifice themselves, along with you too, more than probably. Never readily trust them, or their grievances -- they'd be shortchanged if their foes ever agreed to an agreeable compromise, and / or offered fair redress: almost always, that's not what they want. (There are exceptions ... I'd trust Krugman, for instance.) Society doesn't so much grow when people are prepared to fight hard for their fair lot; it actually mostly grows when people feel permitted to partake in and enjoy the ample lot that looks like it might be opening up for them -- even if it really doesn't end up requiring much of a fight. Their enemies could in fact step aside; amplitude, really just theirs for the ready-taking; and yet they'd manage even being somewhat truly pleased it proved all so all-so-easily-guilt-arousingly easy -- they're in mind to relax, and enjoy themselves some while, not to fight to salvage what is at least necessary for human dignity, from bastards who couldn't care less how much they've suffered, only that they yet try and shave, shower every now and then, serve, but otherwise be done with.

  • SunnydaZe says:

    Revolution can be small actions as well as big. The first step is acknowledging that so much of what we work for and agree on is 90% completely unnecessary for our own human well-being... (Black Friday, anyone?)
    Plus, a system where you can be laid off on a moment's notice and then subsequently evicted with-in the next month is broken and actively wants you fail.