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.
