Men on Wire - 'The Company Men' Review

So the tagline for The Company Men is “In America, we give our lives to our jobs. It’s time to take them back.” Now what do you think this means? Take our lives back or take our jobs back? Because the movie is about a group of businessmen who find themselves suddenly unemployed in the middle of a recession, much like the one that has been going on for the last couple years.

But should we take our jobs back, or take back our lives, which our jobs consume? I vote we should take back our lives. Not that everyone should stop working, that would probably just make the whole problem worse.

The movie focuses on the stock market crash of a single company, and the resulting firing of three executives. Unfortunately, the movie tragically ignores the countless other people that have lost their jobs, not only in the same corporation, but in the economy at large. This is the movie’s biggest mistake, by the way. They approach a very real issue, but they present it from the point of view of three people that almost none of us can relate to.

Sort of, anyway.

When I say we can’t relate to them, I don’t mean that we can’t relate to the possibility (or reality) of unemployment, but rather to the fact that their unemployment means downsizing their super-rich lifestyles, not struggling to pay the rent and feed their children.

But the movie isn’t about three rich guys losing their jobs, it’s about how the total lack of income brought on by unemployment, unexpectedly or otherwise, can overtake every other aspect of your life, simultaneously destroying your confidence and your pride in the process. And equally importantly, it’s about how our economy has gone from a benevolent force providing a comfortable standard of living of American citizens to a cold, calculating machine concerned about nothing other than the bottom line. Something’s definitely wrong there.

Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, and Chris Cooper play the three central roles. Bobby (Affleck) is a young corporate hotshot who loses his job and is forced to face the realities of the world where income might actually be attached to real, honest work. Not that his job would rightly be considered dishonest, but few of us in the working world would really call it work.

Gene (Jones) and Phil (Cooper) are much older executives, and when they suddenly find themselves without work it comes as a sudden smack in the face not only about how the corporate world has changed for the worse (and that they helped cause it), but that they may not really have any marketable skills at all outside of compiling corporate money for the stockholders at the expense of the workers. This is bad policy.

The other powerful topic that the movie expertly approaches is the unfortunate disconnect in the real world between the amount of work that someone does and the amount of money they make. No one will try to argue that a carpenter who runs his own company and participates daily with his laborers does less work than a corporate executive despite making a tiny fraction of the salary. But this is an unfortunate fact about reality and not really something to preoccupy yourself with.

Think movie stars or pro athletes or, that’s right, CEO’s are overpaid? You’re wrong. Sorry. None of those people are overpaid, they’re just paid based amount of money that they generate, which goes the same for employees at all levels of society. Sure, tons of CEOs are wildly corrupt, but ideally people are paid for the actual value of the work they do, and unfortunately, winning court cases and performing in Hollywood movies generates more money than the work that most of us do.

Kevin Costner gives an excellent supporting performance as Jack, Bobby’s brother-in-law, who runs a small construction company that builds one house at a time. It’s kind of a hilarious irony of the movie that the one guy who still has a job in an economy where people are losing their houses is a guy who owns a company building houses. Nevertheless, it’s an important but slightly mishandled message about what exactly the meaning of real work is. It’s easy for more successful members of society to look at construction workers as uneducated laborers, but we learn that they’re much more highly skilled than most people give them credit for. And in a sagging economy with unemployment on the rise, a job driving nails and lugging bags of cement is remarkably appealing.

It should be noted that the original purpose of the movies was escapism – a means to forget the dreary lives that so many people lived in the early 20^th century. Now, 100 years later, we have a movie that focuses on the dreariness of life in a difficult economy. It’s not exactly the kind of fun Hollywood movie that you might like to spend your Saturday afternoon watching, but it’s a rare example of an interesting and well-constructed film that’s entertaining and informative at the same time. Watching it made me feel like I was doing something good for the world. 

The Bean Meter