Review of The Company Men

I read the first dozen or so reviews that came up. I didn't see any mention of what I think is a major theme of the movie, so here's my take. There's a big contrast between the GTX corporation in the movie, which goes through at least 3 rounds of layoffs, affecting thousands of former employees, versus the character of Ben Affleck's brother-in-law, Jack. Jack is a small remodeling contractor, and through one of the discussions in the movie we learn that the job he and his crew are working on for months is a job that he under-bid, hoping to just break even (i.e., NO profit for himself on the job), so he could keep his crew employed through the winter season. This is important to the movie, I think, and it asks us to think about whether GTX had grown far too big. The upper management and board of directors of such a company does not, and cannot, know the workers personally. But Jack the contractor works with his crew, every day, and has lunch with them, so he cares about them, because they are his friends. Maybe there is such a thing as a company being too big; maybe it's too hard to hold onto your humanity in that setting (though the movie asks you to believe that Tommy Lee Jones was able to do it).

That being said, I also want to mention that I agree with several others here, that Ben Affleck's character was irritating, arrogant and unsympathetic through the first half, at least, of the movie. At the end I felt that losing his GTX job was the best thing that could have happened to him, since the experience seemed to help him develop a touch of humility and made him behave more politely to the people around him.