Review of In Good Company (2000) by Edith N — 29 Jul 2009

Swimming Against the Tide.

So it turns out everyone likes this movie but me. This saddens me. The problem, I think, is how much potential I see reaching out at me. This could actually be a good movie. I feel it wanting to be. It has some interesting things to say, and it's got a decent way worked out to say it in. It had a few major flaws, however, that made me bored most of the time I was watching it. Now, you know that I have no qualms turning off movies that bore me. You guys will never know how many movies I start, don't finish, and don't review. It probably works out to dozens in any given year. So why did I finish this one? Well, I actually wanted to share some thoughts about it, and I am morally opposed, for the most part, to reviewing movies I haven't finished. You will find one or two exceptions to that scattered through here--[i]Last Tango in Paris[/i], anyone?--but in those cases, the review is generally about why I didn't finish it, and that's not what I wanted to talk about, though we will get to why I didn't want to.

Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid) is an ad executive for a major sports magazine. He's got a comfortable life--wife (Ann; Marg Helgenberger), two daughters (Alex--Scarlett Johansson--and Jana--Zena Grey), nice house, nice job. Then, Eccentric Billionaire Teddy K (uncredited Malcolm McDowell) buys the company that owns the magazine. Foreman is replaced as head of the department by an up-and-comer, twenty-six-year-old Carter Duryea (Topher Grace). Among other things, it's Carter's job to "thin out" the department. Bluntly, he's supposed to fire enough people to save the company tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of dollars. He's also supposed to increase ad space in the magazine by 20%, a fact I frankly find horrifying, given how much space ads take up in magazines as it is. To make things even more complicated, Carter meets Dan's older daughter and falls in love with her. Their relationship is fraught with the complication of Carter's relationship with Dan.

Except the second relationship, the one between Carter and Alex, is frankly unnecessary. I've got to tell you, I've resolved my debate about Scarlett Johansson. I'm willing to let her prove me wrong, but she hasn't so far--no, in fact. She cannot act. She does have something like three facial expressions in this one instead of the one vaguely confused one she gets in a lot of other movies. However, you could recast the role with essentially anyone you liked, and it wouldn't change my opinion. The situation is, I think, intended to heighten the unpleasantness of the situation, but I don't think it's needed. Rather, we should spend more time with Morty (Dan Paymer), a far more interesting character than Alex. The situation with Alex's transfer to the more expensive NYU, one of the two things that puts financial stress on the Foreman family, is worth keeping. But putting more emphasis on her feels forced. There's no reason for her to be such a focus of the story. For one thing, I think Dan is more interesting and more sympathetic; he was the character, the only character, I really found worth paying attention to, at least of the main four or five.

All right. So let's talk a minute about what it did right, shall we? The fact is, I like most of the basic premise. I like the idea of looking at the change of corporate culture. Oh, I don't think all was happy and benevolent in the Old Days. There was still business--and, Gods know, a lot of companies have been pretty awful over the years. Certainly it's better to be a corporate drudge now than to be a factory drudge a hundred years ago. However, there did used to be an expectation that, if you started working for a company, you might well work for that company until the day you retired. Oh, it was possible that you'd get fired. On the other hand, it wasn't as certain as it seems to be now. You expect, now, that a career will involve working at half a dozen companies, and not because you're just finding your way. There is no sense, now, that a company works better on continuity, that the relationship with others in your workplace makes things better for the company than, well, drones in a soul-sucking atmosphere.

I had, fourteen years ago, a soul-sucking corporate job. Very briefly. I spent about six or eight weeks as the intern for the HomeCommute department of Home Savings, down in California. Corporate headquarters, even. I actually helped to run a federal transportation survey, sending copies and copies of the fliers all over the company. Filling in on the database how many hours registered members of the program spent carpooling, vanpooling, et cetera. Actually, I had my first panic attack on my last day on the job. And while I was working there, I was pretty much thinking, "My Gods, I'm glad I'm not going to be here all my life." I've felt that at every job I've had. However, one of the things I did like about this movie is that a lot of the people in the actual department don't feel that way. A lot of these people, especially Dan, actually love their jobs. Teddy K may be right that a company is like a country; I'm iffy about that. Certainly, though, Dan is right in that a company does still have some obligations to its employees.