The Company Men (2010) * * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  John Wells

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

The Company Men begins with layoffs at a company called GTX, which is closing locations, consolidating facilities, and downsizing in order to maximize profits in an unstable economy.  Sales director Bobby Walker (Affleck) confidently believes his job will be saved, but he is delivered the bad news with a severance package, a spot for three months at a job search center where he can polish his resume and try to remain hopeful that another job is right around the corner.  Meanwhile, he has a posh suburban Boston home, a Porsche, and a wife named Maggie (DeWitt) who understandably realizes the family may need to trim expenses.  Bobby spends the first months in denial, thinking that he'll have a job in a jiff, but soon he finds himself working with his contractor brother-in-law Jack (Costner) building homes.  How good is Bobby at carpentry?  Well, he's a much better corporate salesman.

Also on the chopping block are Phil Woodward (Cooper), one of the first employees of GTX back when it was starting out as a mere shipbuilder and is now nearing 60 with even bleaker employment prospects than Bobby.  Then, there is Gene McClary (Jones), who along with GTX CEO Jim Salinger (Nelson) founded the original company which grew into this corporate monster that itself is ripe for sale to an even larger corporate fish.  Gene, despite his riches, believes the company should show more loyalty to men like Bobby and Phil, but Jim explains that the goal of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value.  They are the eternal "show me the money" people.  Gene also finds himself out of a job when he butts heads with Jim one too many times. 

If anything, Jack runs his small contracting company like Gene feels GTX should run.  Jack has two employees and takes on jobs which may not even be profitable just to keep his team working through the winter.  It's all relative, but The Company Men isn't naive enough to believe that corporations would ever behave like Jack.  As a man of a certain age, I can feel the most for Phil, who has no safety net once his employment is terminated.  In a sense, his life is gone too.  But with Phil and Bobby, we feel the squeeze as mortgage payments and car payments simply don't go away because you no longer have a job.   With that tightening comes our sympathy and in some cases empathy.

However, The Company Men ends with a sense of hope which comes just at the right time for Bobby and unfortunately too late for Phil.  It's less bleak than what happens to many people in the same situation.  As a movie depicting such sad events, The Company Men hums along with solid performances and maybe a sense of gratitude for those who have a job and maybe realize that going to a sucky job is worse than not having a sucky job to go to.