Early on in writer-director John Wells’ The Company Men, Ben Affleck’s Bobby, a recently laid-off corporate exec, a guy who has lived beyond his means too long, has to give up his Porsche. Wells shoots this small, but important little beat of action in a way that mainlines Bobby’s angst, in tell-tell reaction close-ups programmed for sympathy; clearly the Porsche is more than a car,it’s status, a symbol of success, and it’s one reason why this wise-guy slogged through his MBA. Affleck plays the scene like he’s losing a child, not a luxury item.
We already know by this point in Wells’ modest and comfy little movie that Affleck’s Bobby has had this coming, big-time. Arrogant and swaggering, Bobby has that smooth sense of entitlement that impresses human resources execs in real life, but on screen is insufferable. Though a top performer in his role as a salesman at GTX, a corporation which once moved millions of tonnes of shipping but now seems content to merely trade stock, Bobby is amongst the first to get the axe when they downsize as a direct consequence of the GFC. Bobby has great expectations for a job that’s just as good if not better than the one he had a GTX (a naïve and convenient piece of storytelling).
Meanwhile, his wife, Maggie, played by the wonderful Rosemarie DeWitt (terrific in an underwritten and insulting role), actually seems to welcome the change in their lifestyle. Maggie’s brother Jack, a blue-collar builder played with grumpy wit by a laidback and likable Kevin Costner, offers Bobby a gig driving nails. Bobby reckons he can do without that kind of help. Of course he cannot, and that is Wells’ point: America needs guys to still build things, so we can still feel good about life, work, marriage and 'being a man’. Or, to put it another way, The Company Men is a very 21st century version of a 'comeback’ story; it’s doggedly redemptive, upbeat and its politics are as sophisticated as an Old-Style Hollywood putting-on-a-show-to-save-the-farm pic. Except here, Wells tries to sell us the idea that if only America could get together and build something, that ol’ clunky corporation called the US-of-A might get working once more. As movie morals go, that has its charms; as a response to a national (and world) crisis in how and why we live now, it’s a dog that won’t hunt.
Against Bobby’s mid-career blues Wells charts the miseries of two much older men. There’s Chris Cooper’s 50-ish Phil, who feels that his loyalty to the company ought to mean something in hard times, but it doesn’t, and he gets laid off and finds that the work market thinks of him as a bad joke. Meanwhile, Gene (Tommy Lee Jones, in the movie’s strongest turn), best friend of GTX founder Jim (Craig T. Nelson), and Bobby’s mentor, gets the chop for speaking out against the cut backs, especially when the head-guys are taking home millions in profits and bonuses.
Wells and co., including cinematographer Roger Deakins, have come up with a 'ghost town’ visual theme that captures the feeling that something monumental is happening to these people in their universe. Once busy office spaces are stripped and pristine, and become antiseptic show rooms; docks yards are rusty and fallen-down"¦
Wells co-created ER, and The Company Men is full of thin slivers of irony that passes for deep thinking in TV land and magazine self-help columns. Its virtues tend to evaporate in the air-less atmosphere of neat plot making and TV drama serial characterisations, where the right thing to do is always in reach.
One poster ad for The Company Men says, 'In America we give our lives to our jobs. It’s time to take them back." Trouble is we see nothing of this. We never see the men – the white collar guys – at the centre of this story at work, or why they do what they do, and what kind of kick they get out of it.
Wells seems to want to make a movie about something deep in the American zeitgeist; a loss of meaning. The Company Men then isn’t really a movie about work; it’s about boosting values like friendship, community, and family life. The movie says, in part, that we’re all entrepreneurs in our own lives. What tends to discount the potential moral uplift in this punchline is the movie’s answer to why we work: it’s so we can get the goodies. Like the big house. Like the Porsche.
