Film Review: In Good Company
Very much in the vein of About A Boy, In Good Company is a genuinely funny, sometimes heartbreaking trip into the male psyche, while softly satirizing the callous, unforgiving nature of corporate culture.
I will confess that I was one of the first in line to dismiss Chris and Paul Weitz's American Pie out of hand as another prime slice of American juvenilia bound to afflict our nation's youth with warped senses of humor and unrealistic expectations for adolescence. While I still hold that movie in disregard, my contempt for it has been lessened in light of what the Weitz brothers have bankrolled with the windfall from that movie, the smart, pithy Hugh Grant vehicle About A Boy and now the just as satisfying In Good Company. (Excuse me while I conveniently overlook Down to Earth; I'm sure you had forgotten about it anyway.)
Very much in the vein of About A Boy, In Good Company is a genuinely funny, sometimes heartbreaking trip into the male psyche, while softly satirizing the callous, unforgiving nature of corporate culture. The film is buoyed by a pair of wonderful lead performances from Dennis Quaid and Topher Grace, one whose self-effacing, regular guy schtick made him a movie star, and another whose self-effacing, regular guy schtick just might make him a movie star here pretty soon. It's the sort of guilt-free, grownup-oriented entertainment that only seems to come around once in a blue moon these days, unfortunate being that the Weitz brothers can only put out films like this every so often.
51 year-old Dan Foreman (Quaid) is an accomplished family man, one who deftly volleys his job as a veteran ad exec for the country's leading sports rag, Sports America, with his domestic agenda, almost entirely comprised of his wife (Helgenberger) and two teenage daughters, Alex and Jana (Johansson and Zena Grey). His job at the magazine has been steady for 20 years; that is until international mega-conglomerate Globecom absorbs the magazine in a buyout and installs 26 year-old sales hotshot Carter Duryea (Grace) into his old position. Carter, partly out of sympathy and partly recognizing that Dan is a valuable asset, retains him as a "wingman," while other magazine reliables are axed as a knee-jerk cost-cutting measure. Carter insists to his superior (the always great Clark Gregg in full-on arrogant jackass mode) that he can increase profits without the cuts, but only because he is patently uncomfortable with firing people. We see from the start that Carter is too soft-hearted to be truly successful in such an influential position, a skittish soul who finds his only courageous moments at the bottom of endless cups of Starbucks.
Carter's high is short-lived, as he smashes up his newly-purchased Porsche and comes home to find that his wife of only five months (Selma Blair; blink and you might miss her) is leaving. With his wife gone and divorce impending, he is forced to rely on a job that doesn't really suit him for emotional subsistence, and as one might think, he desperately latches onto any attention that he can find. In this case, Dan and his family - including his unexpectedly pregnant wife - are his assuming victims. The impromptu pizza night allows Carter to form a sketchy bond with Dan, his still skeptical "assistant," as well as a burgeoning interest in Alex, whose transfer from the inexpensive SUNY to the more posh NYU has forced Dan to take out a second mortgage. Carter and Dan coexist in the workplace at an arm's length, getting along more for the morale of an office full of employees wary of their job status than for their own satisfaction.
Carter, in an atmosphere where machismo and self-confidence rule the day, is plagued by nagging fits of doubt and unfulfillment, which he chooses to combat with copious doses of coffee, Alex, or both. As a veritable novice, he's been dropped into a very unconventional and uncomfortable position. He's a natural people-pleaser, dropped headfirst into a spot that requires him to flagrantly ignore the human aspect of those he's forced to interact with. Having had his ego battered and his sympathetic spirit exposed in a forum where it shouldn't belong, he believes that he's found an out in Alex. But quite naturally, his instinctual, last-ditch need for validation brings him face to face with the one conflict he's managed to successfully evade.
As the emotional center of the film, Carter carries much of the same underlying sadness and desperation that Hugh Grant's reckless cad Will did in About A Boy. They both hide a massive hole in their souls with heaps of bravado and cursory self-confidence. Dan is the comparative opposite, a guy who retains his humility and sense of purpose even if he recognizes himself to be an inferior salesman. It seems as if Dan is modest in the face of potential embarrassment just for the sake of his family, which is more than we could seem to expect from people like Carter or Will. Paul Weitz, who is credited as the only writer on In Good Company, gradually picks away at Carter's facade until we get to the core of his existence. It's the kind of honest self-discovery that we don't often see in real life, let alone the movies; it's a brutally funny process because we recognize that many of us have an inner Carter trying to find our inner Dan. Thanks to that easily relatable trait, In Good Company is humorous and resonant rather than just humorous and fleeting.
IN GOOD COMPANY
Directed by: Paul Weitz
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Scarlett Johansson, Marg Helgenberger
Distributed by: Universal Pictures
Runtime: 110 minutes