(Those jobs will never be taken back at this rate...)
Times are tough for us all. We have to make a sacrifice every now and then, such as giving up a vacation, or maybe that fancy new car. The Company Men is one of those movies that was released at a perfect time, so you expect it to be a great movie, especially if you saw the trailer. Unfortunately this is a movie that with a great concept, can't get the execution quite right.
The Company Men is a movie about three different successful business men who become victims of corporate downsizing. Our lead victim, Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), loses his job in the mess of this corporate downsizing. Upon losing his job, he immediately begins his search for another job, and is so sure he's going to get that new job so he can keep his nice house, and his Porsche, but he has no luck securing a job that pays the 120k per year salary he had. This, to me, is rather unrealistic because in this day and age, why should you look for a job when chances are you're going to have unemployment benefits for the rest of your life? The trailer seems to give off the idea that Bobby will spend a majority of the movie with his brother in-law Jack (Kevin Costner), but this character is only in the movie for maybe all of 20 minutes in a 2 hour environment. As for the other characters in Gene McCarly (Tommy Lee Jones) and Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), we don't get to spend nearly enough time with these executives to understand what they're going through, and given that they're sort of the higher ups in the movie's company, it's rather hard for the average movie goer to relate to them.
The biggest issue I have with this movie though is it really wasted an opportunity to show that perhaps maybe we need an appreciation for the simpler things and that perhaps maybe success isn't always about your membership to the country club, or that nice exotic car of yours. Bobby is obviously meant to be the sympathetic character, the one we relate to the most. Ben Affleck does a decent job in this movie, given that his character is in Boston yet again, but it's far from his performance in The Town. Tommy Lee Jones gives a rather notable performance as well, but I barely felt anything out of Chris Cooper's performance, and found him to be the most difficult to sympathize with.
Sporting some nice cinematography by Roger Deakins, it's one of the movie's finer aspects. The weakest coming from John Wells' writing. Mostly because Bobby does eventually get his job back, but the ending actually sort of left me asking "have I learned anything from this?" All I learned was how unrealistic Bobby's character is in trying to find a job right away. it's that eventually. The whole movie almost feels like Bobby is just having a bad dream. Also, if you're going to do a story about the lives of three people, you can't just go and make one part of the story interesting and push the other two aside, Hereafter had this problem as well.
This is one of those movies that seems to be screaming "oscar bait." From its cinematography, to its acting, it's trying hard for an oscar. The one aspect this movie misses the most though is the story telling aspect. It's a good effort on John Wells' part since he wanted something that could be a sign of the times, and while perfectly timed, it misses the mark multiple times.
Recent Comments