Before Hollywood discovered it could reap huge profits by adapting comic books, mainstream movies used to attempt subjects that might have something to do with real grown-ups' lives. That impulse rarely surfaces these days, but it's the motor that drives The Company Men, John Wells' downsizing drama set in the Boston area circa 2008, just as the economy was beginning its long, slow-motion crash.
There are very few movies about the world of business (glamorous cautionary tales about the world of high finance, like Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, don't count), but the reality is that most employed people have to reckon somehow with the machinery of the corporate world, even if that just means studiously working to stay out of its jaws. The Company Men isn't just about business. It's about something even more nebulous: the nature of work. And for all the ways in which its view of working -- and of not working -- has been moviefied, it's surprisingly down to earth and affecting. Last year's Up in the Air was slick and slippery -- much, in fact, like its sloganeering hero, played by George Clooney. The Company Men is infinitely more despairing and yet also, paradoxically, more hopeful. It suggests that work can actually mean something to people, beyond just giving them the means to afford a nice house or a fantastic car.
The harsh reality is that being able to make a decent living from really working -- as opposed to just pushing money from one place to another -- is practically a luxury not just in America but, increasingly, everywhere in the world. You won't get rich actually building or making things, or trying to run a company in a way that honors or respects its workers. The only way to make money in this climate is to squeeze people as hard as you can and then discard them. That's a view The Company Men both acknowledges as a reality and rails against.
Ben Affleck plays Bobby Walker, a high-level sales guy at a large and ever-growing corporation who, in the early moments of The Company Men, is given his walking papers. The company he works for is called GTX -- those faceless initials could stand for anything. In fact, they stand for "Global Transportation Systems," which still means nothing. Eventually, we learn that GTX began as a small, Gloucester, Mass.-based shipbuilding company that had been built from the ground up by James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson) and Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones). The former has now crossed over to the dark side of the corporate world, spouting bromides like "We work for the stockholders now." Gene, James' second-in-command, has made plenty of dough off GTX himself -- the interior of his house looks like a mini-Tara. Still, the company's "restructuring" -- presided over by GTX's head of inhuman resources, Sally Wilcox (Maria Bello) -- doesn't sit right with him, although he finds there's not much he can do stop this juggernaut.
Another hapless high-level exec caught in the corporate cogs is Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), who's pushing 60 and who has been with the company for 30 years. These guys may have led a cushy existence compared with, say, the welders who actually build their ships. (That point is made outright by one of the characters.) But the movie doesn't try to apply a Marxist value system to the various levels of work-related suffering: Losing your job through no fault of your own sucks, period, whether you're at the top of the ladder or on the bottom rung.
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.)