Company Man (2001) *

Directed by:  Peter Askin and Douglas McGrath

Starring:  Douglas McGrath, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Cumming, Woody Allen, Denis Leary, John Turturro, Ryan Phillippe, Anthony LaPaglia, Jeffrey Jones

Company Man lists two directors, but it may as well have had zero.    It is all over the map and no laughs result, not even from normally strong comic actors.     The only scene which generates a smile involves Woody Allen as a CIA station chief who denies any revolution is imminent in 1959 Cuba as he lights his cigarette from a burning Batista effigy.    I smiled because of my assumption that Allen could at least perk up the material for a while.    I was wrong.    He phones in his cameo.    The other actors were probably envious because they were stuck in the movie a lot longer.

Douglas McGrath, who co-wrote Bullets over Broadway (1994) with Allen and directed the charming Emma (1996), stars in the film as Allen Quimp, a milquetoast grammar school teacher stuck with a nagging wife who wishes he would get a higher-paying job.    In order to get his wife Daisy (Weaver) and her overbearing father off his back, he lies about being an undercover CIA agent who uses the teaching job as a front.   Daisy and daddy are thrilled, while Quimp accidentally catches the eye of the CIA by helping a Soviet dancer defect.  

Quimp joins the CIA for real and is relocated to Cuba on the eve of Castro's overthrow of the U.S.-friendly dictator Fulgencio Batista (Cumming), who is played here as the least likely dictator you have ever seen.    He is a cross between Pee Wee Herman and a Liberace impersonator.    If that doesn't sound funny, it's because it isn't.   The laughs are supposed to come from the CIA's stringent denials of any likely overthrow despite guerilla attacks, demonstrations, and violence.     We meet Castro (LaPaglia) after the overthrow and we follow Quimp's plot to poison Castro with LSD-laced water at a press conference.     No points for predicting that somehow Quimp, through laborious contrivances, will drink the water instead.   

The laughs never arrive in Company Man, although the setup is to have Quimp as a Forrest Gump-type who stumbles into major historical events without a true understanding of what is happening.    We like Forrest Gump, while Quimp is a non-entity who tirelessly (but tiresomely for us) corrects everyone's grammar, as if by the seventh time it will actually generate a laugh.    The actors perform as if they were directed to overact (or underact) hysterically.     The long, long scene in which Daisy discovers the truth about Quimp in Cuba just as a fellow CIA agent and Batista simultaneously show up at Quimp's residence is one which should be shown in film classes as a lesson on how not to direct a comedy scene.

Company Man isn't just bad.    It is one which has already been forgotten by most of the movie-going public and likely all of the actors and crew members involved in its production.    All have moved on to bigger and better things, although possibly not McGrath, whose IMDB directing credits post-Company Man include Nicholas Nickleby (2002), Infamous (2006), and I Don't Know How She Does It (2011).    Infamous, for those who aren't aware, is the "other" Truman Capote biopic released after Phillip Seymour Hoffman's triumphant performance already won him an Oscar the previous year.    It had fine actors in it, but nothing new to say about Capote.    But, this is Company Man's review and not Infamous', and I think I've said all I need to say about Company Man.