The Company Men (***)

Wearing its earnestness on its sleeve, John Wells’s downsizing drama stars Ben Affleck as Bob, a suddenly laid-off sales manager for a large corporation based in Boston. Wells, a veteran TV writer/director (ER) splits his film between Bob and his former colleagues. These guys—and one can’t help but notice the dearth of women (or non-whites)—may have had more than most of the people who lost their jobs in the recent recession, but then, as research shows, losing what you have feels worse than not having had it in the first place. And so, cocky Bob, with a nice house, nice car, and a golf-club membership, has a lot to lose if the severance pay runs out. His nice wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) urges him to cut the expenses, but he doesn’t want to admit defeat.

Back at his old corporation, his older colleague (Chris Cooper) tries to hang on. His old boss (Tommy Lee Jones), head of the shipbuilding division, tries to convince the CEO (Craig T. Nelson) not to lay off even more workers, but is told, “We work for the shareholders now.” Later, Wells plunks Affleck and Jones down in an abandoned shipyard so Jones can trot out a hoary we-don’t-make-stuff-here-anymore speech. Wells has a habit of hammering home his anti-corporate message this way, including my point above about losing stuff. In the same shipyard scene, the older man laments that, having acquired so many things, men like him are “terrified of losing them.”

A documentary like Inside Job does a better job of critiquing recent corporate greed. The story of Bob and his family is the richer one here, including a subplot about the evolving relationship between Bob and his blue-collar brother-in-law (Kevin Costner), which might be a metaphor for Affleck’s career. The brother-in-law doesn’t much like Bob at first, but eventually Bob wins his respect. Similarly, with his directorial efforts (Gone Baby Gone and The Town) and roles like this, Affleck seems determined to win some respect of his own, as well as turn Boston into a film-making town.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 2/17/11