The Company Men (***½)

Directed by: John Wells

Starring: Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Kevin Costner, Rosemarie DeWitt, Maria Bello, Craig T. Nelson

Seen: May 7th 2011

***½ Out of ****

The Company Men takes a good hard look at corporate life, corporate downsizing, and the effect it has on several people at different stages of and with different means of support in their lives. The movie’s single main character is 37-year old Bobby Walker (Affleck), the best sales manager on the East Coast for an impressively large company, but there are many more characters in the movie, making it a rich movie-going experience.

Bobby Walker arrives at his office boasting a good golf score for the morning’s round, but finds only a sombre mood; he finds out soon enough that “difficult decisions had to be made in areas where redundancies surfaced” and he is offered a measly 12 weeks severance package for his 12 years of service. The woman who fired him, Sally Wilcox (Bello), is burning through the company like wildfire and soon after the initial cut of a few thousand, CEO James Salinger (Nelson) states categorically that they work for the shareholders now, demanding a further 5000 jobs cut. More casualties of war include company man Phil Woodward (Cooper), with a tenure of 30 years and company vice-president and co-founder Gene McClary (Jones), for whom Salinger suddenly has no more time as he starts asking the wrong kind of questions. These men have to redefine their lives as fathers and husbands, scrambling to find ways to support families and evaluate the importance of things from a suddenly different perspective.

Finding gainful employment is difficult though, with the 2008 financial crash as the story’s backdrop. Bobby is too proud to take just any job at first and it takes him some time to figure out what he needs to do to get by, considering both his family and his own sense of himself; Phil wants the best for his daughter, but her college education fees and their mortgage payment need the same money; and Gene, while he has more than enough stowed away, is also at a crossroad.

The main cast all give great performances; Ben Affleck as the status-conscious Generation X’er; at their usual best is Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones as respectively the ruined and disillusioned 60-year old men; Kevin Costner has no problem portraying tough but fair construction worker Jack, Bobby’s brother in law. Rosemarie DeWitt as Bobby’s wife Maggie is stunning, bringing across true feeling in her every expression; and Maria Bello and Craig T. Nelson put a face on the evil corporate engine that grinds you out when you’ve outstayed your usefulness.

I enjoyed The Company Men for the truth it speaks about the importance of the little things as opposed to being rich and not necessarily happy, a good zeitgeist commentary for all of us to heed. It makes you think once again about your life, and it made me think quite a bit, as I’m headed back to the grinder in a few days’ time after a three week holiday. Are you sure that what you’re doing for a life is what you should be doing?