The Company Men
Follows the stories of three salaryman, unsurprisingly.
Ben Affleck is the low-level sales guy that gets depressed after 12 years of a cushy job go down the drain. Ultimately, his family saves him, but he sure deserved more slaps in the face for being so entitled.
Tommy Lee Jones has been in the company since day 1 and gets to see his friend the CEO lay off thousands of workers.
The CEO doesn’t get blood on his hands, so he passes that responsibility to a low level executive, precisely the same Tommy is banging in comfy hotel rooms. He gets mixed feeling from this frolicking, but beats being with his wife.
He loses the battle with the shareholders, but also with the CEO (not that he cares, he is fired eventually and gets a 600 million dollars golden parachute).
Ultimately, he starts a new company with his earning, but I would like to see a sequel where that company goes bankrupt too.
Chris Cooper came from the factory floor and would rather die than going down the social ladder. He has no family support, on the contrary, he needs to support his family. Ultimately, he can’t take it anymore and dies by his own hand.
This zigzags between “Woe is me, I make 160k a year and consider manual labour morally repugnant” and “White collar jobs are a wash, REAL men work with their hands”. Doesn’t help that you get Kevin Costner playing the stereotypical blue collar small business owner with a heart of gold.
Taken as a study of what can happen to people when they are fired from a job that defined them as people this gets top marks, just ignore the shallow political points.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.