An earnest attempt to humanize corporate America's employment statistics, "The Company Men" boasts enough strong actors to ensure some moving scenes but can't quite flesh out the world that contains them. Its points are too obvious, and made in too obvious a way, for the film to succeed.
The picture's most effective performance comes not from the usual suspects in its cast - not from Chris Cooper, for instance, whose haggard self-made exec screams desperation from the start and has nowhere good to go - but from Kevin Costner, in a small part that could have been a throwaway. Playing the Boston working-class brother-in-law of Ben Affleck's soon-to-be laid-off sales director, Costner submerges totally into a thick accent and plainspoken class resentment, never failing to remind Affleck of the human cost behind the high life he enjoys.
Affleck is about to learn that lesson first-hand, of course, though it won't sink in right away. The company he works for started off building ships but grew into the kind of conglomerate lazy screenwriters love - fill a boardroom with suits and add some generic lines like "the stockholders would like to see their share value maximized," and you have an instant villain for your story, laying off good workers willy-nilly.
Which is not to say that John Wells, the writer/director of "Company Men" and a prolific television veteran ("ER," "The West Wing") is lazy. He just has a small-screen approach to storytelling that makes this movie too by-the-numbers to catch fire. We watch as the share-price maximizers embark on multiple waves of layoffs, each wave reaching higher up the beach, until even the no-guff Tommy Lee Jones, who helped build the company, is tossed out for balking at shortsighted strategies. Tidily, Wells shows the effect of sudden unemployment up and down the food chain.
Though the scenario breaks from cliché in some refreshing ways and the dialogue occasionally hits a bull's-eye (after the trauma of his layoff, Cooper exclaims, "My life ended - and nobody noticed"), the movie as a whole is inert, adding little to our appreciation of capitalism's downside.
It's not clear that Wells has much insight to share. He ends the story on a hopeful note that seems willfully blind to the realities of manufacturing in a globalized age. However much we might want to believe, it amounts to a wishful suggestion that we can fix our problems, not by reinventing our world, but simply by taking a few steps back and starting the same story over again.
"The Company Men"
Our grade: C+
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 115 min
MPAA rating: R
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