The Company Men (2010)
Directed by John Wells
Bobby Walker lives the proverbial American dream: great job, beautiful family, shiny Porsche in the garage. When corporate downsizing leaves him and two co-workers jobless, the three men are forced to re-define their lives as men, husbands and fathers.
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What critics compared The Company Men to
No, its not the great Depression and this is not The Grapes of Wrath.
Playing another of the casualties, Chris Cooper evokes Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross; old and forgotten, reduced to dying his hair and begging for work.
And the Pollyanna-ish ending is hardly the stuff of Arthur Miller or, for that matter, David Mamet, whose “Glengarry Glen Ross” nailed the desperation of middle-aged men scrambling for a morsel of the American Dream.
Men is neither as gritty nor as unsentimental as David Mamet’s more uncompromising assessment of office politics, Glengarry Glen Ross.
While the American job market isn’t exactly booming, “The Internship” still arrives late to the issue—3 1/2 years after George Clooney in “Up in the Air” and 2 1/2 years after the Ben Affleck-starring “The Company Men.”
Writer-director J.C. Chandor depicts well-tailored rats scurrying for cover, an improvement over The Company Men, which tried making us feel sorry for fallen money-grabbers like Ben Affleck's character because he lost his country club membership.
Jason Reitmans Up in the Air handled the subject of corporate downsizing with a biting satiric edge, and more recently, John Wells The Company Men focused more directly on the human consequences of the financial meltdown.
But though we’re still down and out, at least we’re filthy rich in films: from features such as John Wells’ The Company Men, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air to documentaries such as Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job, Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story and Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.