The Company Men seems like it should be a good film. Big stars, good trailer,  a very timely and important social topic, critical acclaim. But at the end of the day it really is a pretty lame and unimpressive movie. Plus, I think it sends a bad message.

The Company Men shows none of the guts of New In Town, a universally panned 2009 romantic comedy starring Renee Zellweger. In New In Town, Renee helps the workers start a worker-owned cooperative, and gets them out from under the boot of the profit-chasing corporate pricks whose wanted to flush them all down the toilet to get bigger bonuses. That’s so gutsy it’s downright un-American! Contrast this to the ending of The Company Men, where they all get screwed in the ass, fumble around broke as the rich bastards who fired them prosper, and in the end they return neutered to take their same jobs working for half of what they used to make, and they’re fucking happy about it. This may be realistic, but do we really need to watch a movie of something that is happening all around us every day, in plain view? The bottom line is critics like The Company Men because it reinforces our passivity, apathy and subservience to power. They hated New in Town because it offered a interesting and dangerous alternate vision of what might be possible in the American workplace. These are the simple facts as I see them.

Ben Affleck is one of my favorite actors at this point, but he has almost nothing to do in this film. He just mopes around the whole film, saying almost nothing. Plus the storyline for his character was really inconsistent. You keep hearing how depressed he is and how he’d rather die than move back in with his parents, but he doesn’t look all that depressed or unhappy. In his relationship with his son, sometimes he acts like he totally hates the kid and then in the next scene he’s being all warm and Dad-like to him. And I simply do not believe that his character would fly to Boston on the wrong weekend, or that he and his wife could not fly his ass back out on the RIGHT weekend so he could try to get the job – it’s just bad writing. In general, his character is a mess, and even Affleck’s warmth as an actor can’t save the situation.

Also, it didn’t make sense that his family could afford that million dollar house they were in, even if they got an outlandish, pre-crash mortgage – he only made $160,000 and she didn’t work!

As for the rest of the cast, the Chris Cooper character was annoying, unbelievable and should have been cut from the story. Kevin Costner’s character was actually kind of interesting and Costner played him well. And Tommy Lee Jones turns in a really solid performance as the “millionaire with a conscience”, even if I strongly suspected that there is no such animal in existence.

In the end this film did not leave me with anything. It does not have a compelling message, the details of the story are not interesting, there is no dialog, and the score is unremarkable. I would not recommend it.