BETRAYED BY MY OWN CREATION! HOW!?

Or: Dr. Moreau's Legacy in John Wells' The Company Men

Most of you probably haven't seen The Company Men, considering it was just shown this week at the Sundance Film Festival. For your sake, then, I'll include a short synopsis. The film follows 3 men working for one Boston-based shipbuilding company – sales associate Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck), his boss Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper), and upper manager Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones) – as they cope with getting laid off. The acting is a treat, the writing is crisp, and perhaps the only sour note is a lack of perspective.

I'll get my gripes out of the way first because this review isn't about those. Sometimes it seems to ask, "Oh heavens, who will think of the white males? See how they suffer at the hands of this cruel recession! Have they not endured enough?" I found it difficult to refrain from cackling with glee when sad music plays as Ben Affleck's character Bobby is forced to sell his Porsche, much less sympathize with him. Getting laid off is obviously a difficult and unhappy time for anyone, but even in America there are people harder-hit by this recession than affluent white males.

Despite this, the film is an excellent piece of work. It follows the classic story archetype of the mad scientist: scientist corrupts natural order to create monster, scientist sends monster against enemies, monster turns against scientist to punish hubris. In this metaphor simply replace "scientist" with "the white man," "monster" with "capitalism," and "enemies" with "poor people." "Natural order" still applies, I suppose, simply because capitalism is an unnatural construct, but perhaps the same could be said of all economic systems.

Really I can't be too hard on a movie that shows capitalism in an unfavorable light, but that's just me. The film culminates in the dilapidated husk of a Boston shipyard after a funeral. Tommy Lee Jones grumbles to Ben Affleck that "we used to make something in this country." Two victims of a predatory system lament in the skeletonized corpse of a third. The denoument, to avoid spoilers, is bittersweet but not without hope.

If you can still catch a Sundance showing, you won't regret it. If you can't, it's at least worth a rental when it comes out on DVD.