How big is the corporate-layoff dramedy “The Company Men” going to be? I think it’ll be very large indeed. It’s commercial, it’s warm and funny in parts, it has “great performances” (or at least the kind of acting that makes people use the phrase “great performances”), it’s political, it’s timely, it’s serious. Oscars? Hell, it’ll probably win Nobel Prizes.
But not in economics. I’ll explain why the movie basically amounts to a sort of warm-fuzzy take on Michael Moore’s ideas. It’s nowhere near as interesting as “Up in the Air,” to which it’ll be compared innumerable times. (It also has a touch of “American Beauty.”)
In the debut film as writer-director by lefty TV producer John Wells (“ER”), Ben Affleck is the leading man, and could well win awards recognition, as a sales exec for GTX, a Boston firm that was once known as Gloucester, a humble ship-building business. He’s friendly with a more senior man (Chris Cooper) who worked his way up from the shop floor welding rivets and with his division chief, a very high-ranking exec (Tommy Lee Jones) who is so well off that if the stock price jumps two points he makes half a million bucks. The seldom-seen CEO (Craig T. Nelson), though, needs to cut costs to protect the stock price. That means layoffs, and Affleck is the first out the door. He’s got a darling wife (Rosemarie Dewitt), two adolescent kids, a huge house in the suburbs. And his wife earns a good living too–she’s a nurse. Affleck makes $160K a year including bonuses so total family income is well over $200K a year– and yet getting laid off with three months’ severance plunges the family into financial hardship, to the point where after just a few weeks they have to sell the kid’s XBox. Please.
Maybe a year without work would lead to this situation, but okay. A lot of white-collar workers do need a year to find work, so we’ll overlook that, as well as the increasingly mawkish situation of the Chris Cooper character, who at the outset vows (in a scene played for laughs), “I’ll take down everyone in this place with an AK-47” if he gets laid off. This character’s fate is more or less stamped on his forehead. Hint: He’s old, he’s going to be very frustrated if the company continues to downsize, etc.
Tommy Lee Jones is the one voice of morality at the firm, which continues to lay people off. “What about ethics?” and “These are good people!” and “We used to build things” are his standard lines. Craig T. Nelson, meanwhile, is the heartless downsizing machine who keeps saying the stock is in the toilet. Yet he’s pulling down $22 million a year, building a fancy new corporate headquarters and –outrage of outrages–keeps rare impressionist paintings in his office. How dare he, when people are out of work?
The basic idea, repeated in several scenes, is this: in a country where (as we learn in a line sure to thrill critics), CEOs make 700 times the pay of the average worker, it’s the CEOs who should tighten their belts instead of laying off people. There is a kernel of truth to this line of reasoning (there also isn’t any way to correct this allegedly absurd imbalance with pay curbs and such), but the movie is economically illiterate. I note that at the Marriott in Park City, there are stacks of Wall Street Journals available every day at the check-in desk. I have yet to see anyone else reading this fine newspaper, so let me pass along a little bit of basic economic information of the kind found in the paper.
If Mr. Evil CEO sells his Degas paintings (or whatever they are) and takes a pay cut, that isn’t going to stop layoffs. Global economic turmoil is here to stay, and people are going to change jobs and careers more than ever before. We should get used to it. The CEO’s $22 million check is pocket change when you look at globalization. If China can build some ships $500 million cheaper than GTX can, China is going to get the contract and that’s all there is to it. Fat cats with their $500 lunches (another speech given by Tommy Lee Jones, who is pretty much all speeches all the time) are not going to change that by eating at Pizza Hut. Wells has said the duty of CEOs is to spread the wealth around, but that isn’t their role any more than its Wells’ role to pay his carpenters five percent of what he makes each year instead of whatever the market says they’re worth.
Affleck is so broke he’s forced to take a job as a humble construction worker with his contractor brother in law (Kevin Costner, doing a grating attempt at a Boston accent), who — get this — is actually losing money on the deal so he can keep his workers employed through the winter. The reasoning of this movie is essentially that of “Roger & Me” and “Capitalism: A Love Story” — if only GM had been a big white fluffy bunny of a company and not laid off workers, not closed plants, not modernized and streamlined and cut costs, why, it’d still be business and everyone would be happy and unionized. But GM didn’t have a choice. It couldn’t make foreign competition go away any more than GTX can. It had to cut costs to survive, didn’t cut them enough (because unions prevented it from doing so) and went bankrupt. Kevin Costner’s firm isn’t going to be employing anybody if it goes out of business, and neither is GTX.
The movie is pure economic populism — it’s bound to be at the top of the president’s must-see list — fueled by the idea that if some people are not doing well and others are, the latter caused the former’s problems. Craig T. Nelson, though, evil as he supposedly is, has the most accurate line in the movie, “This is business, not a charity.” Running things like a charity is how the government behaves, and if it could go out of business it would have, a long time ago. Nobody else gets to run up trillions of dollars in debt.
Moreover, the inevitable scene where Jones takes Affleck to the rusting, shut-down shipyard and talks about how glorious it was when people built things in this country instead of moving numbers around on balance sheets (yeah, John Wells, that’s all people do in office jobs these days) is breathtakingly idiotic. The development from smokestack-era manufacturing to services — dignified indoor work, the kind where you don’t get killed falling off a steel beam or inhale noxious fumes is not only necessary, it’s one of the glories of a modern economy shaking off its Dickensian origins. Who wouldn’t want to earn his living at a desk instead of an assembly line? We should cheer every time a rusted-out manufacturing building empties out. Soon enough it’ll be filled up again, by consultants and marketers and software engineers and hipster loft dwellers. Moreover, it’s absurd to say this country never builds things anymore. Has the movie forgotten all its Costner scenes? Home-building, office-building, road-building: These are non-outsourceable jobs, but of course the same governments that believe so strongly in redistributing income have placed all sorts of regulatory hurdles, anti-sprawl initiatives and NIMBY-enabling policies in the way that it’s difficult to build a lot of these things. America’s huge and growing traffic problem, for instance, is a giant effficency-suck out of the economy that means a lot more roads are needed, and yet few are being built.
Never mind. “The Company Men” is going to whip up almost as much interest as “Up in the Air,” and it does have a lot of charm (I enjoyed the scenes where the Affleck character, who is a bit of a prat anyway, learns how to haul plywood and hammer in beams) and enough jokes and sympathy for its characters, schematic as they are, to earn some of the love coming its way. It’s not just Sundance-commercial; it’s seriously commercial.