Moviegoing:
The Company Men

I hustled down Second Avenue to the Beekman Theatre this morning for the first show of John Wells’s The Company Men, a movie that came out just in time to get lost in the Christmas rush. It also did not open wide, which is not surprising, given its extremely thoughtful mood.

Te Company Men is a film that wants us to think about the humiliation of losing your high-status job, but not to wallow in it. Because getting fired is a bummer that we all worry about from time to time — not to mention something that has happened to millions of hardworking Americans in the past thirty-five years — Mr Wells can present the familiar nightmare in loosely arrayed, quickly-drawn details that leave us relaxed enough to consider the reasons for corporate downsizing. There is really only one reason, and it’s stated by the bad guy, James Salinger (Craig T Nelson): “We work for the stockholders now.” If this is true, then nothing is more important than the happiness of rentiers. How do we feel about that? 

The action pivots toward a happy ending when one potential rentier, discharged senior executive (and Salinger’s former best friend) Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones), decides that he would rather work than live on dividends. He would rather start his own company than benefit from the success of someone else’s. He would prefer to risk his capital in a manner requiring lots of job creation. Once he makes up his mind to do this, you wonder why it took him so long, but then you see that of course it would take someone in his position a long time to snap out of a lotus-eating career that dulled the social conscience. When Gene confesses to a former protégé. Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), that he enjoys $500 lunches and private jet flights, you understand why it took a colleague’s suicide to wake him up. 

By this point in the story, Bobby has finally accepted his own fall from grace. Denying it, or believing it to be temporary, was an important element of his make-up at the beginning; he’s the kind of regional sales director who regards the slightest acknowledgment of defeat to be the first step in an irreversible slide toward failure, and the movie focuses on the way in which holding on to stuff — a zippy Porsche, a country club membership, his son’s X-Box — is a vital part of keeping failure at bay. Except, as his wife, Maggie (Rosemarie DeWitt) has to remind him, he is a failure. She does this with all the kindness in the world, hoping desperately to get through to him the need to change their way of life. In Bobby’s eyes, changing their way of life is to abandon all hope. He has to learn to see things differently, and eventually he does, going to work for his brother-in-law (Kevin Costner), a small-time contractor who does his own carpentry. Everything is done to cushion the transition from executive to laborer. We can see that it’s got to be tough, but there are no scenes or tantrums, even though the brothers-in-law have never been friends. Mr Wells trusts Mr Affleck to show us that what seemed too horrible to imagine at the beginning has become almost redeeming. Some viewers will object that the director has pulled his punches, and that is exactly what he has done. He wants to remind us that an decent, ordinary guy can transcend his own drama. 

With regard to the third leading role, that of Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), Mr Wells is willing to make concessions to the grim realities of ageing in corporate life. The simple fact that Phil is sixty (and looks it) means that he has no future. It is also true that Phil doesn’t have much imagination; nor does he have Bobby’s most formidable resource, a loving wife. The only question about Phil’s downfall is whether he’ll take out anyone with him when he blows. Mr Wells is to be commended for eschewing the sensationalism that might have capped this plot line.

The astonishing thing about The Company Men is the commitment that this handful of very capable actors bring to their roles. I resist the word “intensity,” because melodrama is not on the menu; if The Company Men is about how executives deal, or don’t deal, with the ultimate adversity, it is nevertheless not about how they landed there. The gratuitousness of their discharges — all in the nominal interest of increasing shareholder value, but in the actual interest of preserving Salinger’s hold on power — means that the disaster is not about them. (At the same time, this is not a show about capricious Greek gods whose whims must be accepted by mere mortals. It’s a movie about the derailed juggernaut of financialized capitalism, where you make money not by making things but, essentially, by not spending money.) Messrs Afflect, Cooper, and Jones all do things that I’ve never seen them do before; again and again, they ask, wordlessly but with eloquently troubled faces, if the economic mess that we’re in can be fixed.

The women are great, too — especially Ms DeWitt, who to my mind deserves Maria Bello’s billing, not because she’s better than Ms Bello (who plays the company’s HR hatchet, and also Gene’s mistress — a relationship that survives her firing him), but because her part is so much bigger and more essential a strand of the story’s web. We hope that this will be a breakout role for Rosemarie DeWitt. Another face to watch is Anthony O’Leary, who plays the Walkers’ son. The resigned dignity with which he shows the boy preparing to be tucked in by his father, once the family has relocated to the vernacular atmosphere of Bobby’s parents’ house, is striking for such a quiet moment. He pulls out his earbuds with all the heaviness of a man prepared to hear a terminal prognosis. 

I can’t wait to see this extraordinary movie again.