The Company Men Review: Do You Give Up or Start Over?

The Company Men, the feature directing and writing debut of John Wells, is a film that is funny, heartbreaking, uplifting, and relentlessly honest.

The Company Men follows the story of three men working for a huge corporation, GTX. From Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), a young but successful salesman, to Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), one of the senior salesman, to Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones), the head of the transportation division – which Bobby and Phil work for - and a founder of the company. When the economic crisis hits, GTX begins to downsize to cut costs and this touches all three of these men in different ways.

Bobby is first on the chopping block. When he walks into work, he’s called in and handed his severance package first thing. Ben Affleck is very good in this role. When he loses his job, he looks like he was hit by bus, completely devastated. But he manages to keep it together, because he has to harbor the hope that he can turn around and find another job without a problem, because he’s young and he’s that good. What he soon finds out is that he’s competing with people younger, cheaper, and just as good, and no amount of favors called in can change that. Affleck plays this role beautifully. At first he seems to be completely in denial of his situation, but then there is the sense that there is something beneath the surface. There is anger and frustration stewing as he tries to fight off his fears which have to come bubbling to the surface. Affleck lets those emotions do just that: stew and bubble. He doesn’t lash out, rather he makes an incisive remark to cut someone down or buries the fear that his family will find out, but the fear bleeds out his eyes as they dart around the room, wondering if anyone has figured it out yet.

Phil survives the first round of firings. But when the head of the company, James Salinger, a cold and callous Craig T. Nelson, decides he needs to raise the stock value again, he orders another round of lay offs. He opts to do this instead of breaking up the company or selling the new building for the brand new multi-million dollar GTX headquarters. Phil falls victim this time. He finds himself in an even rougher situation than Bobby. He’s older, more expensive, and comes with more debt and kids with college tuitions. He can’t handle it as well as Bobby. It isn’t long before he is spending most of his days in a bar, not helped by the fact that his wife is ashamed of him so she won’t let him come home until after six, for fear that the neighbors figure it out. While Chris Cooper’s part is the smallest of the three, he is indelible as a man made out of desperation. He’s near the end of his life and just had the reset button pressed. Cooper’s work is very good here, because even though Phil is afraid for his job from the start, there is still a pride in how he carries himself. After he loses his job, you can see that slip away from him until it disappears.

Perhaps the most complex character is Gene McClary. He helped found the company with Salinger, whom he considers to be his best friend. However he is powerless to stop the firings of people he considers very valuable. He wants to honor his employees above the wants of the shareholders. And as these people are fired, despite his protests, he becomes richer and richer from his shares in the company. Compound this with the fact that he is literally sleeping with the enemy as he carries on an affair with Sally Wilcox (a sadly under-utilized Mario Bello), the woman in charge of making the lists of who should go and delivering the bad news, and you have a man filled to the breaking point with conflict. Despite all this conflict, Tommy Lee Jones’s performance is masterfully subtle. Instead of smashing things against the wall and screaming, he sits at the breakfast table staring at a newspaper, unshaven and in his robe. He tries to reason with his friend, but is shut out, until whatever fight he has left leaves him and he too has to face the question that Bobby and Phil face: do you give up or start over?



The film is an interesting meditation on what it means to be a man. One role that is always expected of the man is to provide for his family. So how, when the ability to that most basic task is stripped from him, can one feel like a man? It’s not an easy question to answer. Add in to that equation that this pressure to provide often to leads to men defining themselves by their job, so that the loss of that job becomes a loss of identity, and the question becomes even more difficult. It’s the struggle placed before the men in this movie. Bobby, who feels he’s too old to be a failure but too young to be a has-been, Phil, who can’t figure out how to start over and become something else after being the same thing for so long, and Gene, who watches as his life’s work slowly erodes into something he doesn’t recognize anymore. The film answers these questions by demonstrating that human beings can be infinitely malleable if they are willing and that there is more to providing for your family than being able to pay off the mortgage and keep the bank account full.

One very interesting thing in The Company Men is the editing. Time just slips by. In one scene Bobby is sending his kids off to school in their Halloween costumes and five minutes later he is sitting down at the dinner table with the extended family for Thanksgiving. This choice really gives the feeling of being lost in time and how it can just drift away. It puts you in the place of Bobby and Phil as they search for new jobs and how they must feel.

The Company Men is not a film designed to inspire pity for the men with six figure salaries only being able to make five. Instead, it is a film that shows that no one is untouchable, we can all have everything taken away from us by the bad economy. And it offers a solution: maybe things can get better if the people in power decide that they are, in fact, rich enough and decide to care about people more than profits.