Review of The Company Men (2010) by Shiira — 02 Mar 2011

In "The Company Men", you get more Ben for your buck. When we first meet Bobby Walker, the soon-to-be-fired regional sales manager at GTX, it's the Affleck of Ben Younger's "Boiler Room", an unrepentant capitalist who has no time for losers, or in other words, working men, salt-of-the-earth types like Jack(Kevin Costner), his brother-in-law, the owner of a small construction company, whom he humiliates after the carpenter offers him the job of carpenter's assistant.

But as Bobby's search for gainful employment outlasts his severance checks from the shipbuilding corporation that unceremoniously let him go, the finance-related humiliations start to pile up(the nadir being the selling of his Porsche), so with tail between his legs, the once-c*cky s.

O.b., Porsche-less and facing imminent home foreclosure, humbly asks Jack if the offer he had made previously still stands, and in due time, turns into the Affleck of Gus Van Sant's "Good Will Hunting"("Good Bobby Walker"?), a blue-collar type with no career prospects.

As was the case with Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere", this unflashy but well-calibrated film about the fallout from our ongoing economic downturn, requires an audience who can sympathize with(as opposed to revel in) the misfortunes of the very affluent.

Why should we care if the guy in the suit, who pulled in a yearly base salary of a hundred-sixty-grand-a-year, can't afford to pay his monthly fees at an exclusive golf club? Are we supposed to shed a tear when Bobby's son sells his X-Box? After all, this guy knows his way around a feeding frenzy; he's a shark, a cold-blooded meat eater(like his aging pal Phil, played by Chris Cooper, who succinctly makes this point by ordering a rib-eyed steak at a disappointing business luncheon), who under normal circumstances, would have nothing to do with the likes of Jack's construction crew.

He loathes the working class, absolutely loathes them. You can tell. He treats his wife's family like a necessary evil, as evidenced by the aura of aloofness he projects at a birthday celebration for Jack's wife.

Somebody of Bobby's caliber is just biding his time, nursing a beer by his lonesome, waiting to reunite with his own kind, so he can breathe in the rarefied air of esteemed company such as Phil, and his mentor Gene McClary(Tommy Lee Jones), whom unbeknownst to the unemployed professional, is sleeping with the woman(played by Maria Bello) who fired him.

To a guy like Bobby, a man who defines himself by the solvency of his investment portfolio and the toys he owns, anybody who doesn't pull in a hefty salary is dismissed as riff-raff. At a job search center, while the other unemployed men and women, the proverbial riff-raff, participate in a group therapy session, Bobby sits with an expression familiar to the high and mighty, an expression of deeply ingrained smugness, a distancing technique he utilizes on people who aren't of his ilk.

Ignominiously left to his own devices amongst the job center's general population, Bobby searches for a cubicle, the omni-present work station emblematic of the anonymous, which to the former executive, is a far cry from his heyday of sequestering behind the door of a climate-controlled office.

To make matters worse, a black guy takes pity on him, so by default, Bobby befriends his office mate, even though, judging by the way he chastises an African-American human resources woman at a job interview, in which the insulted interviewee goes so far as taking a potshot at her weight, the "very qualified" applicant has very little respect for minorities.

But as "The Company Men" shows, people can change, and during Bobby's stint as a carpenter, he gets Jack to hire his flack friend, a sure-fire signifier that the transformation from corporate shark to working stiff is complete, whose friendship with Danny(Eamonn Walker) recalls Adam Carolla in Charles Herman-Wurmfield's "The Hammer", in which the journeyman carpenter(played by Carolla) calls a Guatemalan illegal his best buddy.

In "The Company Men", Bobby Walker, knocked off his pedestal, as a result, becomes a better man, although it remains to be seen, hypothetically, if he'll revert to his old persona, the longer he holds his position at Gene's new start-up.

In "Boiler Room", as Jim Young, capitalist Affleck tells a group of prospective stockbrokers: "They say money can't buy you happiness? Look at the f*cking smile on my face. Ear to ear, baby.

" How long will it take for tool belt Affleck to revert back into this a**hole? Your answer will determine your feelings about the film's optimistic climax.