Company Men: A movie that deserves an A, at least for its intentions

"The Company Men," starring the indefatigable Bostonian Ben Afflek and a slew of other well-known actors, some in very undistinguished roles, is a film so admirable for its intentions, so noble in its aspirations, so dead-on about the insidious nature of American corporate culture with its piggish CEOs, its heartless cost-cutting and layoffs, its absurd focus on profits and lies, so sweetly romantic about the virtues of the working class, so rueful and sentimental about the bonding of the dispossessed - that I wish it were actually a good movie. It's not - it's just OK - because for all its good intentions it is at heart mostly a mishmash of cliches and stereotypes, totally predictable from scene one, largely improbable - but a nice fantasy nevertheless, if you believe adversity can transform a narcissistic corporate sales VP (Afflek) into a totally good guy, if you believe Maria Bello would be for a minute interested in the aging Tommy Lee Jones, especially after he loses his CEO-level job, etc. In other words, lots of Hollywood bunk out of the days of the great Warner Bros Depression-era fantasies. Now we have depression-era (small d) fantasies. I more or less enjoyed watching it and don't want to be too harsh on The Company Men because I'll say this for it: tendentious though it may be, at least it has a point of view and a willingness to take on corporate America - an easy target (one man takes on the system, a la Wall Street, Jerry Maguire, et al) but one too often treated with obeisance. How many movies have we seen that worship materialism? A thousand? How many that carry the message, in an honest way, that material possessions don't matter so much? Very few. Not a great movie, but I'll give it a gold star for speaking truth to power.