View From a Height

In Good Company

I don't normally do movie reviews. I see plenty of them, to be sure, but I usually walk in wanting to like the film I'm plunking down good money to see, so unless the plot's completely incomprehensible or thoroughly unbelievable, I'll at least shrug and say, "you know, that was pretty good." Still, when the producers of In Good Company started advertising free tickets to bloggers who promised to review the film, I figured it was worth a shot.

The working title of this movie, according to IMDB, was "Synergy." It should have been "The Good, the Bad, and the Lazy." It probably would be a lot more fun to write a review where the highlight was Jared and I giving each other the thumbs-up during (we thought) a planned assassination of the UN Secretary General in a preview, but in fact, the film was pretty enjoyable, as long as you concentrated on the characters and allowed the plot to be so much scenery.

Dennis Quaid plays a 51-year-old director of sales for a high-flying sports magazine, Dan Foreman. When the conglomerate who owns the title sells it to another conglomerate, Topher Grace's Carter Duryea follows his boss over to replace Quaid, who settles for a demotion back to wingman.

That's the business end. On the personal front, Grace's character finds himself deserted by, and then divorced from, his wife of 7 months. Quaid's wife is unexpectedly pregnant. And when the dispirited Quaid mock-invites the desperately lonely Grace back for a family dinner, Grace accepts, and then meets and starts dating Quaid's college-age daughter Alex, played by Scarlett Johanssen.

The Good is the main characters and the performances. I've liked Quaid since The Right Stuff and lately, The Rookie. His face has real character, and he plays the everyman role as well as anyone. He's not brashly heroic, and should probably stay away from those roles. But as Willie Loman with a chance, he's terrific. Scarlett Johansson handles the not-yet-serious about life Alex perfectly. And Grace makes you forget within 5 minutes that he ought to be dating some redhead named Donna.

The Bad is the language. When a film that so freely tosses around four-letter exclamations has a salesman explain that "PFG" means "Pretty Friggin' Good," all it does is emphasize how unnecessary the other profanity is. I'm not a prude, and I enjoy a good cursing as much as anyone, but if it weren't for that, and a very brief shot of Mr. Quaid living out Randy Moss's recent ambitions, it could have been an ABC after-school special, only with depth. A scene leading up to, um, dating between Carter and Alex ends with the leading-up-to, and that's all we need to see.

Unfortunately, even in a character-driven movie, the characters need to have some reason for being, usually called a plot. The Lazy.

Hollywood seems incapable of portraying a company as anything other than evil, layoffs as anything other than unnecessary. But it's ok to have an evil company if it makes sense. I've seen companies that move people around like checkers, and they're not the big ones, they're the little ones run by guys Grace's age who haven't learned anything about people. And the first thing you learn - in 6th grade - is to buy low and sell high. So tell me how Tycoon Teddy K made his mint by buying high, running the property into the ground, and then selling it.

Jonathan Last pointed out in a Weekly Standard article once that Hollywood has an impossibly long timeline for movies. That must explain why Carter's answer to ad revenue targets is "synergy," something that AOL-Time Warner has turned into a bad joke. And the only way I can explain the presence of a "360" in its incarnation here is sheer trend-happy laziness.

The Plot rests on the secondary characters, Foreman's wife Ann, an older salesman Morty played by David Paymer, Carter's go-getter butt-busting win-at-all-costs-even-when-it-doesn't-matter boss, Steckle, and a cameo by Malcolm McDowell as the Titan of Industry. Steckle and Morty are just taken from central casting. The extra skin from Marg Helgenberger's forehead has been used to patch up burn victims. And during the climactic speech by Quaid, you half-expect McDowell to pull out a bowler and reprise his role from Clockwork Orange.

The problem here is the temptation to take all this too seriously. Everyone wants companies to be from Norma Rae or Broadcast News, and they're not. It also says something about contemporary America that a 26-year-old really doesn't know what he wants to do with his life, and we buy it. Forty years ago it would have been Jack Lemmon as Carter, the Grace would have been Kelly, not Topher, and the boss could have been Spence or Rex Harrison or Fred MacMurray. It would have been about people acting their own age and passing judgment on those who didn't, and they would have called it The Apartment. If I take the movie's charicature of business seriously, I'm only doing so on its own terms.

But it's not The Apartment, or even High Society. It is what it is. And as long as you can avoid dwelling on the scenery and look at the characters, it's pretty satisfying.

UPDATE: Jared's much better review is up. I have to concur about the dinner scene. It's very funny. And no, the main point of the film - which redeems a lot - wasn't lost on me.