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?

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The Town Review

Ben Affleck proves with The Town that the brilliance of Gone Baby Gone was not a fluke. This is a smart director with a strong voice that is here to stay.

Doug MacRay (Ben Affleck) is the brains behind a gang of bank robbers operating in Boston. His closest friend, James Coughlin (Jeremy Renner), works the crew as muscle and his right hand man. During a job, Coughlin takes things too far and takes the bank manager hostage. This is Claire Keesey (Rebecca Hall) and now she may be a problem. Doug takes on the responsibility to follow her and make sure that she doesn’t know anything. Now, it is Doug’s turn to take it too far. Doug talks with Claire and asks her out for a drink. He gets the information he needs to put them in the clear but decides to keep seeing her. Soon thereafter, he falls for her.

During this time, FBI Special Agent Adam Frawley (Jon Hamm) is pursuing Doug and his crew. And he is closing in. It isn’t long before Doug finds himself caught between his old life with his crew and the new life he wants with Claire.

The first thing that has to be said about the film is its sense of place is excellent. It helps to have a cinematographer as gifted as Robert Elswit shooting it, but Affleck, having grown up in Boston, knows this town. You can feel the elegance of the Harvard area restaurants he eats at with Claire and practically choke on the grime of Charlestown. When an elaborate chase scene occurs during one of the crew’s heists, Affleck captures the claustrophobia of Boston’s streets. This is a living, breathing world. And with it comes harsh reality.

The action in this movie is visceral. It’s like a gut punch when guns are fired. During a car chase I found myself gripping on to my seat for fear that if the driver turned too fast, I would be thrown from it. Affleck does something very important with his action: he sets up a sense of place so that the audience has a sense of where everyone is and where everything is taking place. By clearly painting the world, he makes the action much more immersive and gripping. This sounds simple but many directors forget to do something this basic.

Affleck can shoot action but he can also put together a scene. The performances in his films can be off the chart good (see Amy Ryan in Gone Baby Gone for evidence). In The Town, Affleck places himself at the center of the story and handles the weight rather well. You can see the acquiescence to his life of crime in the way he carries himself and way he looks at the world around him. This is a man that didn’t want to end up here but, now that he has, accepts it. That is until Claire enters, played here with painful honesty and vulnerability by Rebecca Hall. Renner is great as the most unhinged of the group, constantly carrying a gun in the back of his pants – a ticking time bomb of a man.

Also, if you are like me and always wondered what it would be like to see Jon Hamm throwing junkies through glass tables and run through the street firing a shotgun, this is the movie for you.

The film does have its struggles. Claire and Doug’s relationship is interesting. They are two rather broken people. And in many ways Doug is responsible for breaking both of them. But their relationship isn’t given the time it needs to develop properly. It rushes along with both of them throwing out very personal information with little to no provocation to do so. That said, I will have a hard time looking at sunny days the same way again.

Doug’s turn also feels a little rushed. There comes a point in the film where a lot of information about him is just sort of thrown at the audience so that we can understand why he feels regret and why he would want to make a change in his life. His resolution is built up to be one of the bigger sequences of the movie but ultimately lacks any real tension. It isn’t handled as clumsily as it could have been but not as well as it could have either.

These moments being rushed seems to be a consequence of trying to move the pace along. It is a heist movie after all. Affleck may aspire to make it more than that but that is when the film is at its best. The heists are thrilling to watch and executed damn near perfectly. Occasionally there are some tonal issues, with humorous moments being played too much for laughs.

Affleck puts together a film that is thrilling and fun. He reaches for more than that. At times he succeeds. At times he doesn’t. But overall, he has made an incredibly solid film that a director far more experienced than he would have been proud to have made. He has demonstrated considerable skill with this film, showing that he can direct compelling dramatic and action scenes and that he can create atmosphere. If he keeps going like this, Ben Affleck could be to Boston what Martin Scorsese has been to New York. Because he knows this town.