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Perils of the Corporate Ladder: It Hurts When You Fall
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
“The Company Men” puts us down on the ground after having been up in the air. The movie powerfully revisits a theme touched on last year in the bitter comic drama “Up in the Air”: the devastating impact of sudden downsizing on corporate executives who have lived by the treacherous adage “You are what you do.” Instead of regarding these unfortunate men from the lofty perspective of a charming, cynical hatchet man logging frequent-flier miles — George Clooney’s character in “Up in the Air” — “The Company Men” looks them straight in the eye from inside the trenches.
Riding on the strong performances of Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper, portraying mid- to high-level employees at the fictional Boston company GTX, the movie is realistic enough to make all corporate climbers, but especially men over 50, quake in their boots. If you are what you do, what are you if you’re no longer doing it?
As depicted in the film the modern corporation is a sterile Darwinian shark tank in which the only thing that matters is the bottom line. The old days of corporate beneficence and loyalty to longtime employees are long gone.
The film is the first feature written and directed by John Wells, an executive producer and show runner for “ER.” If it has the compactness and structure of a high-end television drama, there are signs that it was severely edited. A tantalizing subplot about one character’s extramarital affair with a fellow executive has been all but abandoned. We meet the families of the three male principals, but only one wife and one child emerge as more than background figures.
Some of the details are wrong. Even with an annual salary of $160,000, Mr. Affleck’s character, the 37-year-old Bobby Walker, could never have afforded the suburban mansion in which he lives with his wife, Maggie (a spunky Rosemarie DeWitt), and two children. A 12-year veteran of GTX, Bobby is suddenly fired, not for incompetence but to cut costs on the eve of a probable merger.
Yet the minor miscalculations pale beside the film’s unflinching depiction of the perils of heedless upward mobility that, for all the luxuries it affords, looks pretty grim. I remember reading about the lavish but regimented lives of Lehman Brothers’ upper echelon and thinking that this must be hell.
If Bobby is too cocky for his own good, and Mr. Jones’s character, Gene McClary, too honest, there is no question about their fundamental integrity and steady job performances. What matters at GTX is not the quality of work but keeping the stock price afloat, partly to justify the $22 million salary of a chief executive who views the thousands of ruined lives of former employees as worth the short-term uptick.
This cold, flinty-eyed chief executive, James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson), is the film’s closest thing to a villain. He has also been Gene’s best friend since they founded the business. The film’s ugliest message is that friendship nowadays means nothing in the workplace if it impedes profit. That Gene is a man of conscience who vociferously argues against downsizing makes his severance all the more coldblooded.
The movie crisscrosses among Bobby, Gene and Phil Woodward (Mr. Cooper), a 30-year employee and friend of Gene’s who is pushing 60 after having worked his way up from the factory floor to an executive suite. Phil is advised to dye his gray hair and to tweak his résumé to omit any work reference before 1990. Mr. Cooper gives a great, tragic performance of a man who lashes out like a trapped snake when he realizes that, in his words, “my life ended, and nobody noticed.”
Bobby has to give up his Porsche and his golf club membership, sell his house and move his family into his parents’ home. He eventually takes work in the small, struggling construction business run by his brother-in-law Jack Dolan (Kevin Costner). He also attends humiliating outplacement seminars at which the unemployed are instructed to recite slogans like “I will win” and “Faith, courage, enthusiasm.”
With its acutely observant eye for class differences and chilly corporate manners “The Company Men” has two moral grounding wires. Jack, who hires Bobby despite Bobby’s dislike of him and his sloppy carpentry, does the honorable family thing. The movie risks sentimentality by arguing that the satisfaction of building things with your hands might be more rewarding than earning a pile by deal making and paper pushing. But Mr. Costner’s grumpy, taciturn Jack keeps the movie’s bleeding-heart tendencies in check.
In a movie that’s carefully structured to balance the anguish with some hope, the main voice of decency and humanity belongs to Gene. Visiting the empty dockyard where the business began as a shipbuilding operation, he muses eloquently about the days when people made things they took satisfaction in creating. With his sad, crinkled eyes in a craggy face whose expression runs from sorrowful to bitter, Gene embodies the rugged can-do American spirit near the end of its tether but still undefeated.
“The Company Men” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It contains considerable profanity.
THE COMPANY MEN
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written and directed by John Wells; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Robert Frazen; produced by Mr. Wells, Claire Rudnick Polstein and Paula Weinstein; released by the Weinstein Company. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes.
WITH: Tommy Lee Jones (Gene McClary), Ben Affleck (Bobby Walker), Chris Cooper (Phil Woodward), Maria Bello (Sally Wilcox), Rosemarie DeWitt (Maggie Walker), Kevin Costner (Jack Dolan), Craig T. Nelson (James Salinger) and Eamonn Walker (Danny Mills).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/12/10...10company.html
Riding on the strong performances of Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper, portraying mid- to high-level employees at the fictional Boston company GTX, the movie is realistic enough to make all corporate climbers, but especially men over 50, quake in their boots. If you are what you do, what are you if you’re no longer doing it?
As depicted in the film the modern corporation is a sterile Darwinian shark tank in which the only thing that matters is the bottom line. The old days of corporate beneficence and loyalty to longtime employees are long gone.
The film is the first feature written and directed by John Wells, an executive producer and show runner for “ER.” If it has the compactness and structure of a high-end television drama, there are signs that it was severely edited. A tantalizing subplot about one character’s extramarital affair with a fellow executive has been all but abandoned. We meet the families of the three male principals, but only one wife and one child emerge as more than background figures.
Some of the details are wrong. Even with an annual salary of $160,000, Mr. Affleck’s character, the 37-year-old Bobby Walker, could never have afforded the suburban mansion in which he lives with his wife, Maggie (a spunky Rosemarie DeWitt), and two children. A 12-year veteran of GTX, Bobby is suddenly fired, not for incompetence but to cut costs on the eve of a probable merger.
Yet the minor miscalculations pale beside the film’s unflinching depiction of the perils of heedless upward mobility that, for all the luxuries it affords, looks pretty grim. I remember reading about the lavish but regimented lives of Lehman Brothers’ upper echelon and thinking that this must be hell.
If Bobby is too cocky for his own good, and Mr. Jones’s character, Gene McClary, too honest, there is no question about their fundamental integrity and steady job performances. What matters at GTX is not the quality of work but keeping the stock price afloat, partly to justify the $22 million salary of a chief executive who views the thousands of ruined lives of former employees as worth the short-term uptick.
This cold, flinty-eyed chief executive, James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson), is the film’s closest thing to a villain. He has also been Gene’s best friend since they founded the business. The film’s ugliest message is that friendship nowadays means nothing in the workplace if it impedes profit. That Gene is a man of conscience who vociferously argues against downsizing makes his severance all the more coldblooded.
The movie crisscrosses among Bobby, Gene and Phil Woodward (Mr. Cooper), a 30-year employee and friend of Gene’s who is pushing 60 after having worked his way up from the factory floor to an executive suite. Phil is advised to dye his gray hair and to tweak his résumé to omit any work reference before 1990. Mr. Cooper gives a great, tragic performance of a man who lashes out like a trapped snake when he realizes that, in his words, “my life ended, and nobody noticed.”
Bobby has to give up his Porsche and his golf club membership, sell his house and move his family into his parents’ home. He eventually takes work in the small, struggling construction business run by his brother-in-law Jack Dolan (Kevin Costner). He also attends humiliating outplacement seminars at which the unemployed are instructed to recite slogans like “I will win” and “Faith, courage, enthusiasm.”
With its acutely observant eye for class differences and chilly corporate manners “The Company Men” has two moral grounding wires. Jack, who hires Bobby despite Bobby’s dislike of him and his sloppy carpentry, does the honorable family thing. The movie risks sentimentality by arguing that the satisfaction of building things with your hands might be more rewarding than earning a pile by deal making and paper pushing. But Mr. Costner’s grumpy, taciturn Jack keeps the movie’s bleeding-heart tendencies in check.
In a movie that’s carefully structured to balance the anguish with some hope, the main voice of decency and humanity belongs to Gene. Visiting the empty dockyard where the business began as a shipbuilding operation, he muses eloquently about the days when people made things they took satisfaction in creating. With his sad, crinkled eyes in a craggy face whose expression runs from sorrowful to bitter, Gene embodies the rugged can-do American spirit near the end of its tether but still undefeated.
“The Company Men” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It contains considerable profanity.
THE COMPANY MEN
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written and directed by John Wells; director of photography, Roger Deakins; edited by Robert Frazen; produced by Mr. Wells, Claire Rudnick Polstein and Paula Weinstein; released by the Weinstein Company. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes.
WITH: Tommy Lee Jones (Gene McClary), Ben Affleck (Bobby Walker), Chris Cooper (Phil Woodward), Maria Bello (Sally Wilcox), Rosemarie DeWitt (Maggie Walker), Kevin Costner (Jack Dolan), Craig T. Nelson (James Salinger) and Eamonn Walker (Danny Mills).
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/12/10...10company.html