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100Kevin Costner, as Bobby's carpenter brother-in-law, does the finest character acting of his career.
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90When The Company Men stays with its real business -- the calamity of joblessness -- it is first rate. [20 & 27 Dec. 2010, p.145]
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90The Company Men is infinitely more despairing and yet also, paradoxically, more hopeful. It suggests that work can actually mean something to people, beyond just giving them the means to afford a nice house or a fantastic car.
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90The movie is realistic enough to make all corporate climbers, but especially men over 50, quake in their boots. If you are what you do, what are you if you're no longer doing it?
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88Enhanced by superb writing and direction and nuanced performances by an ensemble of great actors, and enough take-home food for thought to keep the mind and senses totally focused from start to finish, The Company Men is pretty damn close to as good as it gets in a disappointing year at the movies.
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80That's not a pretty story, of course. But it's a compelling one and, thanks to Wells and a cast that includes Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper, an entertaining one.
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80This potent, entirely honorable drama by veteran TV dramatist John Wells actually delivers the goods, pondering the pain and dislocation of the new normal.
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80Films have punctured The American Dream before, but rarely so devastatingly as The Company Men does.
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80John Wells's The Company Men is a juicy, judicious drama, and one of the few current movies to address an issue that affects many of the people who will see it - or, because reality is too depressing, avoid it.
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75Solid performances, and a sincere faith in the dignity of the average working stiff, save it from getting too preachy.
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75It's simple stuff, but the movie's heart is in the right place.
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75Though not blessed with a cinematic eye, Wells is a gifted storyteller who gets nuanced performances from most of his actors.
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75The result is, like its characters, a good and decent film in a world that rather heartlessly demands more.
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75Although the actors are convincing and the film well-crafted, The Company Men delivers few satisfactory character portraits because the movie isn't really about characters, it's about economic units.
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75Wells is a wonder with actors - Cooper and Jones earn top honors - and a filmmaker with an instinct for the emotions that bleed between the lines. This haunting movie hits you hard and right where you live.
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75The extremely well-acted The Company Men ends on a hopeful note, but Wells examines the repercussions of a layoff-based economy with devastating precision.
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75The cast doesn't treat The Company Men like a slideshow. They take something overly schematic and imbue it with real anxiety, shame, and humility.
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70A lot of this is compelling, after its didactic and heavily thematic fashion, but if you strip most of it away, along with Roger Deakins' handsome cinematography, you're left with the conflict between Jack and Bobby and something like "Shop Class as Soulcraft: The Movie."
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70The Company Men recalls 1946's great post-World War II drama "The Best Years of Our Lives," and the reason isn't simply its trio of protagonists.
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Dec 7, 201070The Company Men is maybe best understood as a chick flick about dicks: Before its too-easy conclusion, the movie offers a multifaceted glimpse at what can happen when the connective tissue between a man and his source of income is cut, and rarely suggests that it could be anything less than excruciating to stop the bleeding.
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67Despite the all-too-harrowing familiarity of these scenes, they seem more like illustrations than dramatizations of trauma.
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65When it comes to the emotional state of those being laid off, of their families and even of those doing the laying off, it gets things right enough to make audiences squirm.
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63As a drama about coping with hard times, The Company Men doesn't come close to being as sharp or entertaining as "Up in the Air" - which starred Wells' "ER" associate George Clooney.
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63This isn't "Up in the Air," and we're not dealing with this awful event on a metaphysical level. But there's truth in between the cliches.
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63The film remains relatively entertaining, simply because the scenario hits so close to home, no matter where you work.
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60Wells knows how to extract the goods from a great cast, but it's in service of a somewhat mundane story. Still, it'll make you think about the imbalance in the business world, even if the arguments and consequences are nothing all that revolutionary.
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60If only the results weren't so respectably dull.
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60The pain feels cushioned and secondhand, the characters are not terribly sympathetic or interesting other than for their misfortune, and the film shows little interest in analyzing the situation other than to point fingers at greedy CEOs.
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60A quintet of actors carve out a beautiful, ill-fated geometry in John Wells's layoff drama, which might play like a retort to "Up in the Air" if it didn't have shortcomings of its own.
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58Has its heart someplace worthy. But its head -- not so much.
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50The film itself struggles to do justice to each victim. Turns out three stories are two too many. The Company Men should have been downsized.
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Dec 9, 201050I'd like to think the earnest sentiments and machine-tooled dramatic complications of Wells' script could find a receptive audience in late 2010. I'd like to think, too, that the mess we're in demands a gutsier script. Good cast, though.
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50For all his years doing "E.R." and other top-line TV series, Mr. Wells hasn't yet tailored his techniques to the big screen.
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40There's nothing that feels like real rage, nothing that even remotely approximates the spiritual decimation of a termination.