The Company Men

John Wells ("The West Wing", "ER") tackles the economically relevant issue of corporate downsizing in his eye-opening directorial debut.  Ben Affleck stars as Bobby Walker, a successful businessman living the white-collar, suburban dream.  Until he is unexpectedly made "redundant" at his company and watches his entire life fall apart.  As Bobby desperately searches for a new job in today's environment of record unemployment rates, he quickly realizes that he isn't as valuable a commodity as he once thought, and slowly learns what is most important in life.  This movie is a realistic look at how company-wide reductions affect not just the lowly assembly line worker, but the corporate bigwig as well.  At first I was asking myself, "Why should I care about these overpampered a-holes??"  But as the story unfolds and deals one devastating blow after another to these characters, you find yourself starting to sympathize with them.  Affleck is terrific at playing the smug Bobby, and it's both comical and sad seeing his anger at discovering how unemployable he is and how ill-equipped he is at holding a blue-collar job.  Tommy Lee Jones, as a conflicted VP, and Chris Cooper, as a paranoid and bitter executive, also deliver fine performances.  "The Company Men" is a smart and engrossing film that shows the sad truth of greedy corporations that fire good, hard-working people all in the name of short-term profits and inflated stock options.  My only complaint with this movie was the "happy" ending that was a shade too idealistic to be taken seriously.  But the silver lining here is that sometimes those same avaricious pigs that so royally fucked up the financial state of this country can learn their lesson and try to do some good for a change.


4 out of 5 stars