The Company Men [Blu-Ray]

It is a man's world and sometimes it's highly amusing to see the toll it takes on the wealthy males who think their careers are their identities in director John Wells's recession drama, The Company Men. With a fairly impressive cast, Wells provides a film that delivers less than stellar results, mainly due to the fact that it's difficult for the general public to feel sorry for overpaid business executives getting laid off. After being let go without notice, Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck) is left scrambling for a new job and battling his superiority complex despite receiving a pretty decent severance package. The film also follows two older executives (Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones) who are also left jobless and have to struggle with the fact that they're simply too old to find equivalent employment. The Company Men also features decent and vulnerable performances from Kevin Costner and Rose-Marie Dewitt. However, Chris Cooper's character is the only one audience members can truly empathize with, despite the fact that his outcome is a fairly predictable one. Throughout the film we watch Bobby lose his car, house and pride as he struggles to find a way to support his family. (Again, it's hard to empathize with a character who made over a hundred thousand dollars a year but has no savings to show for it.) Just like Oliver Stone's Wallstreet 2, The Company Men fails to depict the economic catastrophe of 2009, merely focusing on dickhead protagonists the majority of us cannot relate to. The Blu-Ray features are slightly embarrassing as well, featuring raw, unedited behind-the-scenes featurettes that look like they were shot by a 12-year-old. However, the interviews with the cast and crew are interesting to watch, if only to see how inarticulate these A-list actors are when they don't have a script to memorize.