As the names scroll across the opening credits – Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Craig T. Nelson, Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner – visions of a crackling, David Mamet-style exploration of the male psyche dance in your head. Alas, writer-director John Wells delivers a stiff television movie befitting his background (“ER,” “Third Watch”). Despite being intensely topical – the movie follows a group of executives who have been laid off from a transportation conglomerate – The Company Men is deadly dull. Never mind Mamet – this can’t even summon the sort of white-collar rage that pulsed through Office Space. Perhaps that’s because the movie would hate to be thought of as white collar in any way. After losing his job, his Porsche and finally his palatial home, Affleck’s sales VP eventually finds his identity by taking on a construction gig working for his contractor brother-in-law (Costner). I think the movie is onto something when it laments how so few jobs allow employees to see the physical fruits of their labor – as construction does – but this sort of working-class pandering undercuts the real pain of the film’s main characters. Like many who were sacked during the recession, these corporate execs so closely identify themselves with their status that they become shell-shocked when it’s yanked away from them. It takes more to overcome that than grabbing a hammer and some nails.
