The Company Men

Directed by John Wells

(R)

***

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The Company Men is a “thoughtful, assured” drama about white-collar job loss, said Richard Corliss in Time. Addressing “an issue that affects many of the people who will see it,” the film examines the human costs of the Great Recession from the point of view of three laid-off executives, played by Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, and Tommy Lee Jones. Though “no masterpiece,” the film is as solidly constructed as our best TV dramas and captures the dull heartache of upper-middle-class men discovering that the American dream comes with no guarantees. The actors imbue the characters with “real anxiety, shame, and humility,” said Noel Murray in the A.V. Club. They give a human face to the downsized even when writer-director John Wells treats the story “like it’s a set of bullet points about the perniciousness of stockholder business decisions.” Still, his approach is “realistic enough to make all corporate climbers, but especially men over 50, quake in their boots,” said Stephen Holden in The New York Times. He’s also generous enough, in the end, to “balance the anguish with some hope.”