THE COMPANY MEN

Written and Directed by John Wells

Starring Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Rosemarie DeWitt and Kevin Costner

Phil Woodward: You know what's the worst part? The world didn't stop. I mean, my life ended and nobody noticed.

I’m not sure if you were aware of this but the world’s financial markets crashed hard in the later part of 2008. Thousands upon thousands of people lost their jobs, their homes and their lives as they knew them. Two years later, the situation is on a reasonable mend but many are still without work and still losing their livelihoods. I don’t mean to make light of these difficult times; obviously, you were already aware of everything I just wrote. John Wells, one of the men behind the long-running television series, “E.R.” and the director of THE COMPANY MEN, however, seems to just be joining the table with his first feature. The ensemble drama attempts to tackle the fallout from this economic crisis but only ends up playing out like a whiney reluctance to let go of America’s overinflated financial hay day.

THE COMPANY MEN opens on Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), strutting into his fancy office after playing a few rounds of golf before coming in. Little does he know, he is about to get canned. The company Bobby has worked for for 12 years, where he earns a salary of more than $120K plus incentives and bonuses, is downsizing in light of the crash. What follows this, is one overwrought termination cliché after another. Will Bobby be able to make his next mortgage payment? Will Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper) be able send his child to an Ivy League university in the fall? Will that other random unemployed guy be able to find another job in his field or will he have to lower his expectations in order to make ends meet? And it doesn’t stop there either. Before the movie ends, some executives will feel great guilt over sacrificing people at the hands of the shareholders, while others will collect their bonuses despite massive layoffs. All that was missing was some suit caving under the pressure and killing himself. Oh wait, it has that too.

Wells clearly believes he is telling an important story and the men of THE COMPANY MEN (also including Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Costner and Craig T. Nelson) do their best to make the plights feel real, but the truth of it is that the problems they face are those of people who were already privileged to begin with. No one here has to face homelessness or hunger. No, everyone here has their savings to fall back on. Everyone here had a great job to start with, which gives them an advantage over all the other people who were already struggling to begin with, when they lost their jobs. All spending time in the company of these men accomplishes, as they lament the good old days when they used money for toilet paper, is the highly unsympathetic reminder that they were living way too large to begin with.

TIFF Review: THE TOWN

Written by Peter Craig, Ben Affleck and Aaron Stockard

Directed by Ben Affleck

Starring Ben Affleck, Jon Hamm, Rebecca Hall and Jeremy Renner

By now, we all know that Ben Affleck is from Boston. His first film as director, GONE BABY GONE, is set there and he has now returned home for his second feature, THE TOWN. The titular town in question is Charlestown, a town in Boston that has seen more bank robberies than apparently any other in the world. Personally, I would think twice about even opening a bank there with statistics like that, but people need their money and other people need to steal it. In THE TOWN, Affleck gives us a delicate, albeit straightforward, balance between these people.

There is nothing particularly new and exciting about the premise. A group of four “townies”, including director himself, Affleck, and new “It” boy, Jeremy Renner, hold up a local bank and take the bank manager (Rebecca Hall) hostage. Affleck stalks her a little afterward to make sure she doesn’t know anything that the FBI can use to find them, but then something unexpected happens; he falls for her. It isn’t really unexpected for us but rather for him. All he’s known his whole life is crime; even his father (Chris Cooper) is doing time and proud of it. I think what he didn’t expect was that he might want something else from life, something more stable and meaningful – something that you actually can’t steal but rather have to earn.

Affleck is quickly becoming a more relevant persona as a director than as an actor, but it is his lead performance in THE TOWN that anchors the film. The supporting cast, including Jon Hamm without a cigarette hanging out of his mouth all the time, is stellar, but Affleck is the big winner here. He may not have found a way to inspire insight from his work as a filmmaker just yet but he knows how to control the story, command the audience’s attention and, most importantly, keep us entertained. My money says he is going to continue to grow on this path. I just won’t be putting that money in any townie bank any time soon.

EXTRACT

Written and Directed by Mike Judge
Starring Jason Bateman, Kristen Wiig, Mila Kunis, J.K. Simmons and Ben Affleck


Joel: Hot girls need jobs too, right?
Dean: Do they really?

If you don’t know the name, Mike Judge, you will surely still know the work. Judge’s work is the work of the people, the little guy. From OFFICE SPACE to TV’s “King of the Hill”, Judge has always voiced those who seemingly have none and he has always done it with a simplicity that is far too base level for some but just the right note for others. With his latest ensemble comedy, EXTRACT, Judge has, uh, extracted himself from one side of the labor force and taken to the other. You might ask, how can the man who championed for the faceless cubicle schmo suddenly flip sides and give more power to the man? Judge knows though that while he may be the man, he is still a man nonetheless, and that work can be just as funny from the other side.


Jason Bateman plays Joel, the owner of an extract production company – that would be extract in the vanilla or the almond variety, in case that wasn’t clear. He has built the company from the ground up and it has afforded him a lovely house, which he shares with his equally lovely wife, played by the always hilarious, Kristen Wiig. His company is on the verge of being bought for a handsome price when the very shaky ground he has been standing on for years finally falls out from underneath him. Regardless of his own personal collapse, Joel must keep his assembly line running even though the people working it are barely working with a full set. The disenfranchised may have been given their day in OFFICE SPACE but in EXTRACT, they are the butt of all of Judge’s jokes.


Judge does not judge though. He may be laughing at these hapless folks but his hero is hardly escaping the very same finger pointing. The cast of EXTRACT – rounded out by Ben Affleck as Joel’s drug-doin’ buddy and Mila Kunis as the hot girl who gets away with being bad because she’s beautiful – are in on Judge’s jokes the whole time and you will laugh right along with them. You will laugh but Judge will also get you thinking, even if just a little, about why we work. Whether you do it hard or whether you do it barely at all, Judge wants us to ask why we do it period. He isn’t saying that we shouldn’t work, just that we should know what we’re working for. And for that, EXTRACT works just fine.