Men At Work

In Good Company: Topher Grace, left, and Dennis Quaid practice male bonding at the office. Photo by Glen Wilson. Courtesy Universal Studios

Dan Foreman has a union name, but his collar is as white and upright as he is. He sells ad space at a sports magazine, an old-fashioned job – paper and staples – that matches his life (or maybe shaped it). He has two nearly grown daughters, a mortgage and the demeanour of a man at once bone-tired and content. As played by Dennis Quaid (now with a new pudding centre), Dan moves through his corporate offices on a small cloud of surprise: This is my life? Well, it’s pretty good. I’ll keep it, thanks. He even showers with a sense of duty – scrub, scrub, sigh – but when he looks in on his teenaged daughters at night, he is happy.

Can he keep this life? In one day, Dan finds out that his wife (Marg Helgenberger) is pregnant and his job is much smaller than it was when he left the house. Globecom, a multinational headed by a Murdoch-Trump figure with the ironically cuddly moniker Teddy K (Malcolm McDowell), has clamped its jaws on a new acquisition, the magazine empire that includes Sports America. Dan is demoted from his corner office to make way for Carter Duryan (Topher Grace), a 26-year-old rising executive famed for hocking dinosaur-shaped cell phones to the untapped “under-five market.” Carter’s job is about electronic waves, and words without meaning, like “synergy” – no paper, no staples. He wants to cross-promote Sports America magazine through “factoids” on the back of Globecom’s Krispity Krunch cereal. Now Dan, exactly twice Carter’s age, is the dinosaur.

Grace, of TV’s That ’70s Show and films p.s.. and Traffic, can do only one thing, but he does it well. The “thing” is total cockiness with a jolt of insecurity; quick, knowing delivery and a deadpan expression that’s mostly funny in contrast to his Howdy Doody face. Carter is high on ambition, as moony about money as a little boy with a new toy (when he finds out about his promotion, he does a karate chop), and yet he can’t quite pull it off convincingly (he nearly falls while chopping). His bored wife (Selma Blair) leaves him, and while driving a new Porsche off the lot, he crashes it. Without explanation, he continues to drive around displaying that bashed headlight and fender to the world: a cry for help, a suggestion of disorder. Carter Duryan is a young man movie hybrid: the avarice of Wall Street’s Bud Fox, the uncertainty of The Graduate’s Benjamin Braddock.

In Good Company is a comedy that takes men’s lives seriously. Quaid has been busting monsters and the elements in several action films of late, but with this performance of wonderful bewilderment, he reminds us that men aren’t just heroes or husbands, despite what the movies tell us. Most movies about men – and most movies are about men – measure male greatness by accomplishment. Recent biopics, Ray (about blues hero Ray Charles), The Aviator (about eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes) and Kinsey (about sexologist Walter Kinsey), forgive their subjects all kinds of bad behaviour because their work is so exceptional. And if the work isn’t exceptional, then the lives attached are invariably tragedies of a kind. About Schmidt, a version of the Willy Loman story, sees the failed businessman as a neutered slave to his wife, in fact, not a man at all.

But for most men – and women – work is just work, and it’s the life outside the workplace that stands as evidence of one’s success or failure. Carter gets a taste for the world beyond the office when he invites himself to Dan’s suburban home for dinner. Over pizza, one of Dan’s daughters tells Carter he’s “prematurely old,” and the other, a college student named Alex (Scarlett Johansson), plays foosball with him. Dan is deeply respectful of his daughter, as she is of him, even though he’s palpably terrified to see her grow up: dropping Alex at her dorm, he gives her a hug and the look on his face as he walks away is like he’s just attended her funeral.

Scarlett Johansson plays Dennis Quaid's daughter in the film In Good Company. Photo by Glen Wilson. Courtesy Universal Studios

If Johansson is in a room, men are going to fall. For Carter, her character’s a truth serum. “I’m scared s---less,” he says. Around her, he confesses to the existence of this other, creeping side of himself, the dangling headlight of doubt. They begin a secret relationship but Alex, a tennis player eager to shed her teen jock identity, has her own goals. The most unconventional thing about In Good Company is how it upends so many of the conventions that make it appealing in the first place. It’s breezy and easy to look at, but these glimmering surfaces host one surprising moment after another. When Carter gives Alex an expensive necklace – they playact adulthood – she says: “I feel funny.” It’s a lovely line. She recognizes in him a kind of neediness that passes for love in dumber movies.

In Good Company is smart in a way that feels very contemporary, and nearly urgent. While documentaries like The Take and Fahrenheit 9-11 earnestly expose the dark side of the global economy, In Good Company is one of the first films to fictionalize this epoch of endless corporate mergers, layoffs and cutbacks, and to use the absurdity for laughs. On the morning of the Globecom takeover, employees walk through the office anxiously asking one another: “Are you fired? Am I fired?” It’s as if a sniper is in their midst. Anyone who has been through a merger – and that’s a lot of us, these days – will relate to the ridiculousness of that first rah-rah meeting when the new management (“Are we psyched?” shouts Carter) offers assurance that nothing will change, all the while stealthily making lists of which heads will roll. Dan loses an ad account with a rum company, because, as his old friend explains: “The company that bought us is having a feud with the company that bought you over wireless phones in Europe.” Soon Teddy K appears in the cartoon glow of a dais lecturing his demoralized new employees about “democracy for the consumer,” an abstraction of little comfort to a room of people who have either watched their colleagues get fired, done some firing themselves, or now await firing. Dan’s eventual act of rebellion feels sitcom-ish, and small – but what gesture wouldn’t, against a leviathan like Globecom? – and the film’s tidy ending betrays the Tyco-Enron history it mocked so well. But until these final stumbles, In Good Company is one of the truest, funniest depictions of modern work life seen in recent years.

Director Paul Weitz, working from his own script, is carving out an interesting niche for himself as a documentarian of the male spirit. He treated teenaged boys with respect in American Pie, and made an aging scoundrel sympathetic in About A Boy. In Good Company is a massive leap forward: a film of great confidence and thoughtfulness about the interior lives of men and the exterior world’s indifference to them.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.