THE COMPANY MEN: a timely tale of middle class misery

THE COMPANY MEN tells a particularly timely and depressing story - that of working men fired from their jobs as a result of the recession which hit in late 2008.

But I think director John Wells has made a mistake in focusing on 3 middle and senior management types who are left to weep in their McMansions after receiving their pink slip from the Boston based shipbuilding company where they've toiled for years. It's tough to summon up empathy for senior sales executive Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck) when he discovers his wife's canceled his golf club membership to save money, or for Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones) whose stocks in the company increase in value by half a million dollars a few days after he's fired.
The only character deserving of any of our sympathy is Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper) who's worked his way up from the factory floor and now finds himself the wrong side of 50 and dying his hair to compete with other unemployed men half his age. Phil's life is genuinely devastated by his firing. He has neither the financial nor emotional resources to fall back on so it's little surprise that his tale is the saddest of the three explored.
While none of the m are the Wall Street types who became so reviled after the crash, it still seems somehow insensitive to zero in on their plight rather than that of 3 ordinary working stiffs who - after all - constitute the majority of those who've suffered as a result of the recklessness of bankers and brokers and other so-called financial experts. More of us could empathize with them because it's closer to our own experience.

During the last Great Depression in the 1930s Warner Brothers had the right idea. Their films told stories of ordinary working class families struggling to get by, and those stories resonated because their audience was mostly working class families struggling to get by. When they showed the upper classes it was usually to poke fun at them. Perhaps the problem now is that everybody wants to be middle class so no one wants to be reminded of who they really are socio-economically speaking. Better to be shown the struggles of the wealthy we aspire to be than the wretchedness of the financially impoverished we are or have recently become.
While the material may be flawed there's nothing lacking in the performances of Cooper, Affleck and a particularly world-weary Tommy Lee Jones. Though the story's set in Boston the entire cast mercifully goes easy on the Boh-ston accent, and it's interesting to see 90s superstar Kevin Costner in a subsidiary role as Affleck's scornful brother-in-law. The part's too big to be a cameo but seemingly too small for an actor of his stature; his place in the cast strangely mirroring Affleck's character's fall from grace and eventual acceptance of any job he can find regardless of it's distance from his former status.
Ultimately, what really lets down THE COMPANY MEN is its Hollywood ending. It's here that director Wells finally takes a leaf from those Warner Bros dramas of the 1930s and - unfortunately - his timing is off by 70 years.