Customer Reviews

The Company Men

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(27)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This film seems to be getting mixed reviews at best. It wasn't even released nationwide, or at least not at a theater near me, and very little promotion was given to it. I think that's a shame because it's an enjoyable film that actually explores not just the recent economy and downsizing in Corporate America but the North American situation (obsession with property, possessions and passing pleasures rather than true happiness). That said, I understand that films involving the recent economy haven't done well and I can see why many people wouldn't be eager to get out only to sit in a theater and watch what can be seen as a very depressing story that has a lot of truth to it.

Outside of that fact I still say this is a good film if not entirely great. Ben Affleck is well cast and likable as a man who has it all until his company is hurt by the economy and he finds himself included in the list of recent layoffs, the last thing he expected given his position at the company. He is eager to find a new job and believes he'll have no problem given his credentials but he soon finds the only positions he can attain are those that he considers beneath him. Soon his termination package runs out and he and his wife (excellently played by Rosemarie Dewitt) have to face some realities about their nice house and many possessions including a beautiful sports car. Dewitt and Affleck do a great job of playing a couple under a lot of stress who still clearly love each other.

The film isn't as depressing as it sounds based on that synopsis, from there Ben Affleck's character slowly realizes that when all else fades family remains constant and his parents and brother in law (Kevin Costner) help him make it through to the other side.

While this goes on Tommy Lee Jones plays a higher business executive at the same company who is very upset with the way the company is being run. When he is eventually let go despite suggestions that could help the company he finds himself dissatisfied with his life and looking to find new meaning. Craig T. Nelson plays the head of the company who causes more issues by taking jobs out of the industrial end of the company to keep investors happy. Chris Cooper does an excellent job playing a man in the same position as Affleck only with much less fortunate results when he doesn't have the same support group (truly the most tragic aspect of the film).

Economy films are a lot like films about the Iraq war, not many want to hear anymore about these issues with the media already bombarding us. However, I would say this isn't so much an economy film as it is a film about a very specific aspect of the current human condition that just happens to use the recent economy issues as a starting point (much like how The Hurt Locker wasn't specifically about Iraq).

To me the film wasn't as depressing as others are painting it to be because the message wasn't about how bad things can get, it was about how good we can make things. Everything is a choice, if we stop becoming obsessed with things we have no control over in hopes of stability, if we stop building things up and acting as if they can never fall down, if we accept that nothing is permanent other than the happiness we give ourselves then we might move past all this and be in a better place, a place that can't be taken away from us.

The ending keeps it from being a truly great film, leaving things wrapped up almost too neatly too suddenly despite attempting to be openended and leaving Affleck's character with a mountain to climb. Still, if you liked last year's Up In The Air you'll enjoy this and if your interested in how business's wind up in trouble or if you like films that show the strength of family then this may be for you, give it a try. I hope this film finds a larger audience on Blu-Ray and DVD, I will certainly be adding it to my collection for repeat viewings.

* I hope this release has a director's commentary.

This is a film that oozes with realism and timeliness. The GTX corporation, headed by an overpaid, callous CEO (Craig T. Nelson)--who cares only about the stockholders, a new corporate headquarters, and his salary and stock options--cuts divisions and lays off thousands of workers--some of whom have been with him and the firm for decades. It's not that they aren't hardworking and dedicated, it's just "business."

One of the men who is laid off is in his thirties (Ben Affleck); the other is twenty years older (Chris Cooper). Another (Tommy Lee Jones) roomed in college with the CEO and helped him build the company from the ground up, concentrating on shipbuilding in the Boston area. All three men live lavishly, with fancy houses, furnishings, and cars.

Affleck is great as the proud, bitter, and then humbled white-collar executive, who has to sell his million-dollar home (in the depressed housing market) and Porsche, and then move in with his parents and work for his brother-in-law (played nicely by Kevin Costner) constructing someone else's mega-house. Cooper is also good--downtrodden and desperate, forced to dye his hair, and grovel at job interviews and with associates. And Jones is wonderful--a man with a conscience in the business world, who cares about the people who work at GTX. He also starts to reevaluate his life, both professionally and personally, in middle age.

The film--written and directed by John Wells--hits home. Most of us know people like the ones we see in The Company Men. They can be vain, pushy, and full of themselves; but when things don't go their way, they can be depressed and helpless. Yes, people need to make a living, but they also need to think about what's really important--family, friends, and self-fulfillment. This is a film that makes you think about these things.

"The Company Men" is a sober telling of life within a modern company. Men come to be defined by their jobs and when the job is taken away from them, they are lost. Their world as they understand it simply collapses.

At a high level, "The Company Men" covers the lives of several executives of the ship building division of GTX Corporation, an American conglomerate. Profitability and growth seems to be eluding the division and the only response of management is downsizing and, when this fails, more downsizing. Each man is thrown into a whirlpool. Their lives of debt and over-consumption come to a screeching halt. If there is one message from this film it is that too many people assume that things won't change. Too little attention is paid to saving for a rainy day. Consumption is king.

There are excellent performances by Tommy Lee Jones and Ben Affleck. Both end up being "let go" and both struggle with the consequences. However, eventually, reality must be faced. This is not an easy row to hoe. In the case of Ben Affleck's character, his life style is forced to undergo big changes. His house is sold, his family moves back to living with his parents, his wife gets a part time job and he takes a job of manual labour from his brother in law.

Without spoiling the plot, there is a somewhat happier ending. However, in the meantime, the film gives an excellent portrayal of so much of modern corporate life. It's a dog eat dog world out there. Just remember that change can be forced on anyone.

Mild "spoilers" contained herein:
A decent, well-paced but largely predictable movie showing what a few "downsized" employees at a large corporation go through when the rug is yanked from under them. Unless you were living in a convent for the last 3 years, none of what you see here will be particularly surprising. The makers of the film dutifully present the greedy heartless CEO (Craig T. Nelson), the hot-shot MBA (Ben Affleck), the blue collar heart-of-gold guy (Kevin Costner), the overlooked company lifer (Chris Cooper), and so on. All the actors do a great job, including the always-good Tommy Lee Jones as the disillusioned philandering millionaire, but there's not really a tremendous amount of meat on the bones of this movie. The actors are attempting to give life to thinly-drawn caricatures distilled from the headlines.

In the end, I don't really care too much about anybody, partly because their troubles are not my own (I've got it worse than everyone shown in the movie), but largely because so many character development questions are left unanswered:
Chris Cooper's character is 60: why is losing his job so devastating? How long did he plan to work? Wouldn't he be close to retirement with some money saved up?
Ben Affleck's character is devastated to lose his Porsche and his country club membership. Why? In his parents' house again after selling his house, he tells his wife "I couldn't wait to get out of here. I was gonna be a CEO." That's it? That's all you got? His parents seem like nice folks. Where's the motivation? Why should we care about this corporate wanker?
It's hard not to be sympathetic with any character Tommy Lee Jones plays, but he stands idly by for most of the movie as the company he helped build is taken away from him, and as people he cares about gets fired, and as he himself gets fired, as he has an affair with the H.R. department chick, walks out on his wife, he sits on a giant pile of money and doesn't help anyone... what happens at the end doesn't redeem him, especially considering the speech he gives to Affleck about loving hotel suites and expensive meals.
Craig T. Nelson's CEO is one-dimensional... it could have been interesting to get under his skin, but the movie didn't have time for him.
And really: do they HAVE to show the passage of time through the cliched use of holidays? Halloween, Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas trees, working on New Year's Eve, Easter egg hunts are all shown.... the only thing missing is the last scene happening on 4th of July.
And so on.
Rosemarie Dewitt gives a good performance as Affleck's wife, and Maria Bello does the best she can with the H.R. character.

Comparisons are being made to "Up in the Air", however, "The Company Men" is more relentlessly bleak and conventional, and has far less snappy dialogue. Affleck's excellent kiss-off to one potential employer, and a couple of exchanges at the employment agency are the only thing bordering on funny.

As a distillation of the business headlines from 2008-2010 and how it plays out in a few lives, this is a very good film, and probably all it aspired to be. As a compelling, moving work of cinema... not so much. 3-1/2 stars.

In the movie "Boiler Room," Ben Affleck plays a "senior" stockbroker who informs the newbies that, "I'm 27. I'm a dinosaur. Luckily, I'm very good at what I do." A decade later, he plays a thirty something who gets fired from his high powered salesman job and faces a bleak economy, along with colleagues Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper. Downsizing these days means moving in with your parents, having to dye your hair and quit smoking, and - the ultimate indignity, having your spouse start working more hours in order to make ends meet. Luckily, for Affleck, he gets a job doing manual labor with his brother-in-law, played by Kevin Costner, who passes along a few Life Lessons, along with instructions on how to put up drywall. Other movie characters aren't as fortunate.

In eighties' cinema, greed was good, or at least acceptable. In the nineties, there were a spate of movies about yuppies getting blindsided by trauma and having to reevaluate their priorities. In "Regarding Henry," Harrison Ford plays a lawyer who becomes a better person by getting shot in the head and suffering brain damage. He realizes that his colleagues are amoral sleazebags and takes his daughter out of boarding school. It may have been good that Henry's daughter didn't want to attend in the first place because with Henry's newfound ethics, he probably wouldn't have a job much longer. But the film didn't explore that.

Nowadays, even movie characters can't afford spontaneous job quitting. This is a grim movie, with few answers to the current economic crisis. The cast does a decent job, but you want to watch a film about downsizing liberally laced with black humor, try the remake of "Fun With Dick and Jane" with Jim Carrey and Alec Baldwin.

"It is not the economy"...the boss says, "it's the stockholders, the investors; they want a return on their investment," by holding shares in the company, which means the company uses their share money for business and thereby the investors want a return on their investment plus a nice dividend...that's a check coming in the mail without disturbing the principal, hopefully!

The movie told us that this company was doing fine, price per share was $97 a share; certain shareholders in the company holding a million shares or so were making millions with every $.50 cent rise in the stock.

But...the CEO, the owner of the company had a salary of $22 million in the year some of his "indigenous" friends and company family members were laid-off and their lives ruined and turned upside down to give the investors a return on their investment.

THERE IS SO MUCH MORE IN THIS MOVIE THAT MOST PEOPLE ARE LIKELY TO MISS. (I WANT TO CALL IT A "FILM", AS IN, DOCUMENTARY.) I went to see this movie with more than one person and everyone admits that there was something seeming low-budget about it but they left the theater with something they know they will never forget.

Ben Affleck...seemed so real it was unreal. KEVIN COSTNER: it was good to see you, Kevin...and you were right on Kevin, which I don't think all the time; I'm not a fan; but in this movie you were masculine, real and even sexy. So, stay in front of the camera Kevin if you're going to do this kind of real work.

SOME YEARS BACK...maybe in the 70s, last century, the Japanese developed a company-employee model and made Toyota a household name. The Japanese model basically said: (a) If people love working for you they will love coming to work for you, and (b) if the employees are brought in as a part of your company they will care about the company; they will have lifelong customers and generational repetitive customers and you will have less enemies of the company and your company will be cared about and become a part of the national landscape. That was then, back in the day when SEARS seemed like home and a member of everybody's family.

TODAY THE CORPORATE CULTURE IS DIFFERENT and American business is suffering. Today's model is: Work For Us and we could downsize you next week or in 35 years, two years before your retirement and you'll be lucky if some 40-year-old grads from Ivy League U.S.A. hasn't bet the entire retirement fund money on an offshore oil well. (AND IF YOU THINK THIS SATIRE CAN'T BE TRUE BECAUSE RETIREMENT FUND MONIES ARE SET ASIDE IN SEPARATE ACCOUNTS...then I say unto you....YOU are still dreaming and have not awaken to reality.)

I WILL BUY THIS MOVIE ON DVD and have dinner parties that are bound to get rowdy.
--MO

...this movie is a bit exaggerated in some places and too preachy in others. One wonders what Ben Affleck's compensation was in comparison to, let's say, a carpenter who worked on the set... What I found amusing, though, is how the wealthy Hollywood types are out of touch with the real world. In the latter part of the film Ben Affleck gets an offer for an $80k a year and mentions that he used to make twice as much at this previous job. So let's see, here we have a guy who's been written as a $160k professional, and yet somehow he's living in an $850k house and drives a Porsche. That's stretching it a bit too thin.

Tommy Lee Jones gives a somber and yet dignified portrayal of executive Gene McClary, the right hand man and best friend of a hardened CEO who has made the calculated "business" decision to axe thousands of jobs to boost his company's sagging stock. Sickened by those around him who seem emotionally detached to the effects the layoffs have on lives and families, McClary wrestles with what to do.

Two middle management executives in McClary's division (Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper) are soon axed as well and each struggles in his own way to bounce back from the loss of the job that they were once so secure in and the devastating effects the layoff has had on their families and their own self esteem.

I liked this movie. Tommy Lee Jones' performance was great as I felt his character conflicted over what to do with all the layoffs going on around him while his boss (himself included) continued to enjoy the corporate high life. On the flip side, it was interesting to see the difference between Ben Affleck and Chris Cooper's characters after they were laid off and confronted with the harsh reality of losing their cushy jobs. I wondered how each was going to handle their plight and the movie does take a few unexpected twists and turns following them. Although the movie's message is a bit cliché in its demonizing of corporations to make a buck no matter what the human cost, the movie was enjoyable and entertaining and captured the unfortunate spirit of American corporate culture as it exists today.

The Company Men was a sobering watch, and though it is not without its flaws, the excellent cast makes this a worthwhile watch. The movie focuses on a couple of white men holding white-collar jobs and how the economic downturn affects them and their personal lives. Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck) plays a hotshot executive at a major corporation and at the beginning of the movie appears to be living the American dream - he owns a McMansion, has a Porsche, a stay-at-home wife, and two kids, oh, and a country club membership. Walker's world comes crashing down when he is laid off as part of his company's downsizing. He spends a third of the movie in denial, arrogantly assuming he will be re-employed in no time, refusing to downsize his life of luxuries (snapping at his wife when she refuses to pay the overdue country club membership), and basically refuses to accept the new reality of his life. His practical wife on the other hand goes back to her nursing job and convinces Walker to sell the house and move the family in with his parents to save costs. A large chunk of the movie deals with Walker's coping during this tough period, and how he eventually comes to accept his circumstances. Kevin Costner plays Walker's builder bro-in-law, Jack Dolan, who despite his own financial difficulties, reaches out to help his sister's family.

Then there's Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones) who is at loggerheads with friend and company CEO, James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson). Salinger embodies corporate greed, choosing to lay off as many workers as he can to satisfy his stock holders and maintain his 22 million salary. When McClary is inevitably let go, the former top executive does some deep soul-searching about where he wants to go next. Another company man, Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper) does not fare as well. In his fifties and set in his ways, Phil takes the lay-off the worst - he is at his wits' end trying to figure out where he fits in the world, given that all his working life has been devoted to Salinger's company.

The movie is not without flaws. Walker is portrayed as earning 160 K, and yet has this lavish lifestyle. In reality, that salary would never be able to afford Walker such a luxurious lifestyle in the Northeast (the writers may need a reality check here). Then there's the weak sub-plot of McClary (Tommy Lee Jones) having an extramarital affair with the HR lady (Maria Bello). There is no real credibility in this relationship and their intimate scenes fall flat and cold.

However, the movie is sobering because it shows how even the upper middle class did not remain unscathed by the downturn, and serves as a wake-up call of sorts. Walker's character undergoes a sort of evolution as the movie progresses, learning the familiar lessons of sacrifice, endurance, perseverance, compromise, and above all, about what really matters. It also shows how some families learn to survive despite the odds, and some crumble in the face of difficulties. It was not a pleasant watch, but the strong performances by the three main actors makes this a compelling movie.

A very relevant small movie about a group of men let go from a company. The men are all late 30s and older. The trouble they go through and the suffering is all very relevant. Quiet, soft spoken and true. Not a movie to spend a date night but one that needed to be made, especially when small movies aren't made very often in Hollywood anymore. Every actor is just right and there is not grandstanding to be had.