Downsizing in America: The Company Men

L. Quart: Downsizing in America

VERY FEW Hollywood films have directly confronted this country’s economic crisis. One candidate is Up in the Air (2009), whose opening montage depicts actual recently laid-off workers (with a couple of actors thrown in) expressing their confusion, rage, and despair about the economic and psychological state that the economy had thrown them into. However, the unemployed are little more than an engaging device in Up in the Air, rather than its center.

A much more earnest, timely, and serious attempt to deal with the problem is The Company Men, smoothly if unimaginatively directed by successful TV vet John Wells (ER and The West Wing). The film is set among the survivors of GTX, a giant but recently downsized shipbuilding and transportation company based in Boston. They must face a horrific employment market and the psychic pain of their extremely comfortable world—replete with six-figure salaries, stock options, and expensively furnished suburban houses (skillfully if unsubtly detailed)—shattering into pieces.

The Company Men stars a slew of first-rate actors—Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Rosemarie DeWitt, Kevin Costner—with a second-rate, handsome, bland one with little emotional range—Ben Affleck (Bobby Walker)—in the lead. Though they all deliver apt, pointed lines, their characters are much less interesting than the problems they face. In fact, except for the downsized Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones)—a founder and vice president of GTX, whose deeply lined face emanates anguish, exhaustion, and conscience—none of the characters offers any hint of an internal life. Jones is an actor who can do a great deal with very little, and he succeeds in convincing us that he is genuinely soul-stricken by his company’s heartlessness.

The film centers on Bobby’s plight. The product of a modest childhood, he’s become a swaggering, golf-playing, Porsche-driving sales executive who can’t adjust to the fact that he’s no longer a top dog. He has a smart, supportive wife and sensitive son, but he is angry and wallows in self-pity. “I’m a thirty-seven-year-old unemployed loser who can’t support his family,” he says, but in truth he pays little attention to anyone besides himself. As a last resort he does construction work for his brother-in-law Jack Dolan (Kevin Costner). Dolan is a skilled carpenter and a decent man, but his salt-of-the-earth wisdom can be a bit much. Jack and Bobby have an uneasy relationship. High on his prior successes, Bobby is condescending toward Jack, and Jack is in turn dryly ironic about the pretensions of an executive milieu he has little use for. Jack believes in the dignity and satisfaction of hard work—a sentiment echoed by McClary when he visits the abandoned shipyards: “We used to build something here.”

That’s the message the film projects. The Company Men presents a corporate world that has lost its way. It has become more interested in deal-making and the manipulation of stocks and bonds than in the production of goods. As the giant corporation that McClary founded grows distant from its roots as a shipbuilding operation, the responsibility for its employees is subordinated to the bottom line. The head of GTX callously says, “We work for the stockholders now.”

There is something inherently sentimental and revisionist in believing that a company like GTX, even at its inception, was not willing to compromise its humanity in pursuit of profit. But in Hollywood style, the film ends with a wish fantasy that’s supposed to leave us with some hope. Bobby and a number of the other downsized employees are hired back by McClary, who goes back to his beginnings and opens a small shipbuilding outfit.

The Company Men is a solid, intelligent, and unadventurous film that deals directly with an American social problem, and it displays some insight into the nature of social class. But when I think of a great European political film like Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (1977), I remember how it brilliantly constructed a dialectical relationship between the consciousness of its characters and the richly rendered historical forces they faced. Comparing John Wells and Wajda might be absurd, but The Company Men could have been much better. Wells grants little individuality and life to its characters and only skims the surface of the complex corporate ethos that shapes them.

Leonard Quart is in the process of co-authoring a fourth edition of American Film and Society Since 1945 and is a contributing editor of Cineaste.