Movie Review - In Good Company

Finally, a movie that has the balls to say that being true to yourself is more commendable than being a soulless capitalist. It’s a bold stance to say that “money isn’t everything,” so kudos to writer/director Paul Weitz.

Ostensibly, In Good Company is the story of what happens when a 26-year old corporate schmuck with no experience named Carter Duryea (Topher Grace) is installed as the boss of the newly demoted 52-year old ad sales veteran Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid). The magazine for which Forman used to run ad sales is the latest acquisition by a Newscorp-esque multi-media conglomerate. Coincidentally (and we all know big-budget feel-good flicks don’t have any real coincidences), Foreman has a very attractive 19-year old daughter, Alex (Scarlett Johansson), and a well-put together home. Soon, Duryea is wrestling Foreman toward current corporate practices and being seduced by the intellectual and beautiful Alex.

As a typical ambitious but callow Harvard youth, I am sort of expecting to kamikaze toward the top of the corporate ladder and, meanwhile, hoping a soul mate will fall into my lap—if for no other reason than it is expected. Company is scary, funny, relevant and, at its best, fairy-tale enchanting. It is scary because Duryea’s character at the beginning seems to be the best of what one can hope for in going from college to the corporate world: he is in a leadership role (a role given him, hilariously, because of his success in creating Dinosaur cell phones for the 2-6 demographic), he has a beautiful wife (Selma Blair in a somewhat demeaning cameo playing her Legally Blonde bitch) and oodles of money.

Yet the movie’s ideal is Forman, who has been demoted at work, is unable to express his emotions, has had to take out a second mortgage to pay the bills, is expecting a new child at 52 and treats his daughters like he’s Jim Anderson, the patriarch of “Father Knows Best.” Basically, the people we are all being trained to be—concentrated on success in our chosen fields without understanding what it feels like to be happy—are doomed to never be at peace. Most of the film is intelligently and humanly funny. It shows that work is often about maintaining dignity at home as much as it is about what exactly one does; that people will do anything they can to not seem like the bad guy when firing people; that people are instinctively afraid of change; and that much of the motivational talk at work doesn’t actually mean anything. We learn that some families are well-adjusted and happy, even if they don’t quite understand how to grow out of traditional family roles. To compare, there are also examples of different household organizations like “my wife wears the pants” and no father/single mother. Oddly enough, they’re all played for laughs.

Caveat: Company is not Office Space, but it is not trying to be. It is not a romance, but a response to the current corporate climate. Foreman’s key speech is an indictment of the meaninglessness of corporate-speak that freezes the Murdochian C.E.O. of his company, inciting the audience to cheer. But sometimes the astonishingly charismatic cast gels so well that the movie just coasts into fairy-tale territory. Particularly during the scenes of Alex and Duryea finding happiness with each other, in the words of another film’s tagline, “you will believe a man can fly.”

The frustrating nature of this film is that it pulls the audience in with a witty dissection of modern corporate life, but its conclusion refuses to really address the issues it brings up. There is an undercurrent to the entire movie reinforced by its far-too-easy deus ex machina that says that the world should revert to the traditional archetypes of the 1950s. It is a frustrating punk-out that a movie so interested in looking at modern mores should seem like it could be a remake of a 1950s Cary Grant-Warren Beatty comedy. Walking out, there is the realization that there are a lot of problems ahead in trying to find a place in the real world that could make me content, but no understanding of how to find that contentment.