If you can tell me what I was supposed to take away from The Company Men I would be greatly appreciative. So far as I can tell the moral of the story is that in the current economic climate you better hope you don’t lose your job, but if you do, you damn well better hope you know someone with millions of dollars who can come along and set up a new company so you can get another one. Other than that, you’re all screwed.
Now that I think about it, perhaps that is the message of writer/director John Wells’s corporate downsizing feature that stars a fleet of acting talent but does very little to put it on display. Perhaps the downtrodden feature with, what I assumed to be, a shining beacon of hope at the end was actually just a sign of how ignorant we all are. Maybe the point was to say that even when things look like they may be getting better you can pretty much count on it all going downhill soon enough because you haven’t learned anything along the way.
At the center of the story is Ben Affleck as Bobby Walker, a star salesman whose likes involve money, golfing and being a big shot. Bobby’s world comes crashing down on him, however, when he is among several that get laid off from a Massachussetts based industrial company. Now what? Take away the cush job and now he’s just an arrogant windbag who thinks he’s better than everyone else, but doesn’t have the high-paying job he needed to “prove” it. And this is a guy we’re supposed to empathize with.
Then again, maybe we aren’t supposed to find common ground with Bobby. Maybe some of the company’s higher-ups share some of humanity’s basic values; such as Chris Cooper’s Phil Woodward (the easiest to sympathize with of the bunch) or Tommy Lee Jones’s Gene McClary (he’s cheating on his unappreciative wife with Maria Bello)?
If you’re still searching, there’s the head of the snake in Craig T. Nelson, the company’s multi-millionaire CEO whose interest in money outweighs his interest in his employees. Should he take a pay cut to save a few jobs or just axe the employees in order to maintain his salary, bonuses and the plush new office space he’s currently developing? I think you know what he decides to do and I think you’ve already read deep enough into the commentary to understand what is trying to be said with this character. Moving on…
Now we come to Jack Dolan (Kevin Costner), the small business construction worker and brother to Bobby’s wife (Rosemarie DeWitt). Jack and Bobby are from different worlds and they don’t get along, but when Jack learns of Bobby’s employment troubles he offers him a position on his crew. Bobby’s response, “I think I can do better.” Jack’s response to his sister, and the most poignant and accurate moment in the film, “Your husband’s an ass hole.”
For a film that seems intent on sticking up for the little guy, The Company Men fails miserably. This is pretty much a film about a whole bunch of people either complaining about their current station in life, or they’re screwing someone over or just plain unlikeable. All of which makes the manipulative nature in which this film attempts to earn our sympathy by using the current employment crisis feel entirely disingenuous.
The film’s tagline reads, “In America, we give our lives to our jobs. It’s time to take them back.” There’s an aggressive nature to this thought, not the whimpering soul that exists throughout this movie. Instead of a “take it back” attitude from the small guy, the biggest voice comes from the guys with the most money in The Company Men. This seems it would be the opposite of the film’s intent.
I’m not sure if something was lost in the translation from Wells’s script to the editing room, but all I was left to pull from was a story of a bunch of people I didn’t care an ounce for. Sure, I understand people are flawed, but it’s hard to care for a group of characters when I don’t really like any of them in the first place and none of them actually learns anything.
