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The Company Men
Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kevin Costner
This could have been a much better movie, and I have the feeling that I’m missing something in my assessment. The Company Men seems to have all the right stuff in it, but one production decision makes it largely ineffective, something I don’t think is intentional.
Ben Affleck is Bobby Walker, a mid-to-late-thirties corporate executive who does one of those jobs that doesn’t make any sense to me even when people take time to explain them. He works for a large company that builds ships but at his level, the real business is building wealth, for his fellow executives and for the company’s stockholders. Walker has a wife (Rosemarie DeWitt), two kids, a huge house, membership at a country club, and a Porsche. It isn’t long before that list is whittled down to just the wife and kids.
Walker is downsized, his position cut by the very colleagues with whom he has slashed others’ jobs. He finds himself on the market for a new position, but that market is glutted with guys just like him: experienced, smart, charming, middle-aged.
The story follows him through the agonizing process of having to cut things out of his life as he continues to search for work. I’ve been there a couple of times, and the toll it takes on a man’s self-worth is huge. The stages Affleck puts his character through are familiar to me, and he does a pretty good job. DeWitt as his wife is also very good, understanding that Walker needs to remain the decision-maker about many things, but standing ready to swoop in when missteps lead them close to disaster. I was reminded of the women in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath who leave the decision-making up to their men but who really keep things from getting catastrophic.
We also get to see Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper as men who still work for the corporation. They have been with the company for a very long time, working their way up from actual hands-on work on ships. They know what it’s like to wield both a blowtorch and a pink-slip, and there is a toll taken on them as the company they helped build slowly goes under.
The lives of these men are compared deliberately to the life of Walker’s brother-in-law, Jack Dolan (Kevin Costner), an independent contractor who renovates houses and employs a small group of men. Times are up and down for him, too, but he works alongside his employees and has lunch with them and sees the product of his own labor. The film’s presentation of Dolan is its most heavy-handed move, a blatant effort to pound home a message that would have been clear without so much attention pointed its way. I think it’s testament to Costner’s acting that after an initial annoyance with this plot element, I found myself looking forward to the Costner parts of the film.
It probably sounds like I’m doing a lot of summarizing, but that’s pretty much all there is to say about this film without getting interpretive. The acting is solid. The writing is mostly fair to pretty good. I enjoyed the dialogue, I enjoyed the performances, I liked the one-on-one scenes with Affleck and DeWitt, and I even liked the kids, which just about never happens. Scenes with Costner and Affleck are kind of cheesy and heavy-handed, but whatever. They kind of work, too.
My problem is that for all its good pieces, the film fails to affect me much. I do care about the characters, but what happens to them leaves me strangely unfeeling. There is a coldness, a distance director John Wells seems to place between me and everyone on the screen. Colors are cold and grey, scenery seems to be filtered through some kind of emotion-sieve so that what gets through is the feeling that I ought to feel something, but also the realization that I really don’t. Is this intentional? I suppose I’m to be reminded of how this kind of thing goes on every day and that it apparently affects me only insofar as it contributes to my 401(k), but that is a layer of finger-pointing that the film doesn’t really earn. Does it want me to feel something about these characters or doesn’t it? The fact that I have to ask pretty much says enough about whether or not anyone would want to see it.
5/10 (IMDb rating)
56/100 (Criticker rating)
Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kevin Costner
This could have been a much better movie, and I have the feeling that I’m missing something in my assessment. The Company Men seems to have all the right stuff in it, but one production decision makes it largely ineffective, something I don’t think is intentional.
Ben Affleck is Bobby Walker, a mid-to-late-thirties corporate executive who does one of those jobs that doesn’t make any sense to me even when people take time to explain them. He works for a large company that builds ships but at his level, the real business is building wealth, for his fellow executives and for the company’s stockholders. Walker has a wife (Rosemarie DeWitt), two kids, a huge house, membership at a country club, and a Porsche. It isn’t long before that list is whittled down to just the wife and kids.
Walker is downsized, his position cut by the very colleagues with whom he has slashed others’ jobs. He finds himself on the market for a new position, but that market is glutted with guys just like him: experienced, smart, charming, middle-aged.
The story follows him through the agonizing process of having to cut things out of his life as he continues to search for work. I’ve been there a couple of times, and the toll it takes on a man’s self-worth is huge. The stages Affleck puts his character through are familiar to me, and he does a pretty good job. DeWitt as his wife is also very good, understanding that Walker needs to remain the decision-maker about many things, but standing ready to swoop in when missteps lead them close to disaster. I was reminded of the women in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath who leave the decision-making up to their men but who really keep things from getting catastrophic.
We also get to see Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper as men who still work for the corporation. They have been with the company for a very long time, working their way up from actual hands-on work on ships. They know what it’s like to wield both a blowtorch and a pink-slip, and there is a toll taken on them as the company they helped build slowly goes under.
The lives of these men are compared deliberately to the life of Walker’s brother-in-law, Jack Dolan (Kevin Costner), an independent contractor who renovates houses and employs a small group of men. Times are up and down for him, too, but he works alongside his employees and has lunch with them and sees the product of his own labor. The film’s presentation of Dolan is its most heavy-handed move, a blatant effort to pound home a message that would have been clear without so much attention pointed its way. I think it’s testament to Costner’s acting that after an initial annoyance with this plot element, I found myself looking forward to the Costner parts of the film.
It probably sounds like I’m doing a lot of summarizing, but that’s pretty much all there is to say about this film without getting interpretive. The acting is solid. The writing is mostly fair to pretty good. I enjoyed the dialogue, I enjoyed the performances, I liked the one-on-one scenes with Affleck and DeWitt, and I even liked the kids, which just about never happens. Scenes with Costner and Affleck are kind of cheesy and heavy-handed, but whatever. They kind of work, too.
My problem is that for all its good pieces, the film fails to affect me much. I do care about the characters, but what happens to them leaves me strangely unfeeling. There is a coldness, a distance director John Wells seems to place between me and everyone on the screen. Colors are cold and grey, scenery seems to be filtered through some kind of emotion-sieve so that what gets through is the feeling that I ought to feel something, but also the realization that I really don’t. Is this intentional? I suppose I’m to be reminded of how this kind of thing goes on every day and that it apparently affects me only insofar as it contributes to my 401(k), but that is a layer of finger-pointing that the film doesn’t really earn. Does it want me to feel something about these characters or doesn’t it? The fact that I have to ask pretty much says enough about whether or not anyone would want to see it.
5/10 (IMDb rating)
56/100 (Criticker rating)
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