Cinema 2011 #25: The Company Men

14.7%.  444, 299 on February’s live register. That’s the current state of unemployment in Ireland according the Central Statistics Office. The last four years of economic emergency have resulted in an 81% increase in emigration, with our country’s youth bleeding away to far flung corners of the globe, and a daily financial funk in every news bulletin. If there’s any place on Earth that can empathise with John Wells’ The Company Men, it’s the country whose glory days seem long past. The story of corporate downsizing and its effects on three white collar workers, Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones, after they lose their jobs. Shame then, that only one of them is worthy of any sympathy.

The Company Men was written and directed John Wells, a producing and writing alumnus of some of the best shows you’ve watched on the small screen – The West Wing, ER, Third Watch – and marks his feature film debut. It’s the story of the GTX Corporation, a maritime company facing hard times, which resorts to slashing staffing figures in an effort to balance the books, First to go, and protagonist, is Ben Affleck’s Bobby Walker, a sales hot shot, who we’re clearly supposed to feel sorry for, but whose complete ignorance of his impending doom only serves to highlight why the world is in this mess. He’s middle management, a species inherently difficult to like, and when you watch him grimly cruising up to his palatial New England home, pulling his Porsche into the driveway, the audience can easily spot a couple of ways in which the Walkers can tighten their Prada belt.

 But no, such humility doesn’t make for economic drama, and Bobby instead continues to lead the high life for as long as he can, all so this has been hot shot can remain shit hot. Keeping his club membership up to date, maintaining his sports car, discouraging his nursing wife from going back to work, he’s just another douchebag in a designer suit, with tastes too rich for a stripped down job market. The script is littered with mixed messages regarding Bobby, and it’s hard to tell just who exactly Wells wants him to be. On the one had, there’s his spending excesses. On the other, when his brother-in-law (a one-note Kevin Costner whose presence merely serves to labour the point that white collar = bad, blue collar = good) offers to throw him a bone with a carpentry job, he shrugs it off. Of course he does! He has an MBA and 12 years experience in silk-tongued sales, not a callused understanding of tongue and grove.

Tommy Lee Jones fares even worse, as the upper management renegade Gene, cut from the board when his loose lips sink ships’ profits. He’s supposed to represent the moral anchor, a man who wants to fight for the workingman’s job, but whose stock portfolio is worth hundreds of millions. It’s had to feel sorry for a man who feels betrayed and also betrayer, but who can afford anything and even scores Maria Bello as part of his severance.

Chris Cooper’s Phil stands alone among these men, as the real victim. Having climbed the ladder from factory floor to executive restroom, he’s the only one who seems unlikely to find another job. Advised to colour his hair and refrain from referring to his Vietnam service on his CV, you get the feeling he’s floating adrift and a quick dye job won’t mean he’ll be buying any more ties.

The film is reasonably well acted, but fails to engage with the economic woes to the same extent as either last year’s triumphant Up in the Air, or even the Barrytown trilogy’s The Van. None of these men is poor, none of them on the breadline. They’re victims of the west’s Credit consumption, like all of us reading this. We can relate, but we don’t root for them. They’re just a bunch of yes men who led us here in the first place. And we don’t want to see them driving Porsches.

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