In Good Company (2004) – Decent Films

Movies, especially comedies, frequently tell us that there’s more to life than professional success and getting ahead. Too often, though, that “more” is defined in terms of being able to kick back, relax, have fun, be oneself, enjoy life, etc. How often does Hollywood take notice of a hero who values, say, building loyalty with customers and coworkers, or who actually has it together at home with a committed marriage and a happy family, as opposed to merely undergoing a clichéd third-act revelation that family is what really matters and that he’s been wasting his life?

In Good Company does this and more. Rather than merely
giving us characters struggling (or not struggling) to balance
work and personal or family life, the film itself strikes a
dramatic balance between the office and the home. It’s not just
about personal success versus professional success, it’s
appropriately interested in both. What’s more, it’s also
interested in personal and professional ethics, personal and
professional integrity. Imagine that.

These themes play out in an emotionally resonant, reasonably
satisfying story by writer-director Paul Weitz, and thoroughly
engaging performances from Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, and
Scarlett Johanssen. It’s not without faults. At times the satire
crosses over into silly farce, and, while the last act avoids the
most obvious clichés, it’s still a bit tidy. And some of the
film’s basic themes seem undermined by an unfortunate subplot
involving perplexing decisions by more than one character. But if
these faults can’t quite be overlooked, the film’s virtues are
rare enough to make the whole package worthwhile.

As he did in About a Boy with Hugh Grant and then-tween
Nicholas Hoult, Weitz focuses on two protagonists, not just one,
representing different generations, backgrounds, and values. The
first is Dan Foreman (Quaid), a seasoned fiftysomething ad-sales
manager for a sports magazine and a loving husband and father of
two daughters, one in high school and one, Alex (Johanssen), on
the cusp of leaving the nest. The second is Carter Duryea
(Grace), a bright young up-and-comer whose fragile marriage is
threatened by his all-consuming career at an aggressive media
conglomerate that exhibits the sort of corporate-culture foibles
that keep “Dilbert” creator Scott Adams in business.

What brings the two men together is a corporate merger.
Carter’s conglomerate buys out the parent company of Dan’s
magazine, and in the ensuing shakeout Dan’s corner office and
position are given to Carter.

The scenario of an older, savvy professional forced to report
to a bright but inexperienced and callow young company man has
obvious cultural cache, not to mention sitcom potential. What
makes this setup more than typical movie high concept is Weitz’s
sympathy for both his leading characters — not just Dan.
In other hands, Carter could easily have been a cardboard jerk
existing only to be taken down a peg, an antagonist for Dan to
suffer under and finally triumph over. Instead, Weitz gets inside
Carter’s insecurities, ambitions, and inner emptiness. He may be
callow and unqualified, but he’s also self-aware; he knows
he’s unqualified, and behind his bravado is disarmingly
panic-stricken.

Carter’s anxious self-awareness is disarming not only to the
audience, but also to Dan’s daughter Alex, who initially mistakes
him for an intern rather than anyone who could be taking her
father’s position. Carter, likewise not realizing that he’s
talking to the daughter of the man he’s replacing, admits
candidly that he’s clueless and terrified. Yet even when he does
learn who she is, he can’t stop being self-effacingly honest
around her. Perhaps she’s drawn to him as to an abandoned puppy
or wounded bird.

Carter, for his part, is drawn not only to Alex, but to Dan’s
whole family. Carter’s professional star may be rising as Dan’s
is faltering, but Dan’s home life is rock-solid while Carter’s
personal life is falling apart. Just the thought of sitting
together around a family table over a home-cooked meal, or even a
delivered pizza, is an almost mythic experience for Carter.
(Contrast with another career-and-family comedy, The Family Man, which paid lip
service to valuing suburban domesticity over power and prestige
while in fact having only ridicule, not appreciation, for the
trappings of family life.) Carter envies what Dan has, and the
more time Carter spends with Alex, the more he feels this kind of
happiness within his grasp.

(Spoiler warning.) Carter and Alex’s early flirtations
are natural and unforced, but their relationship takes an abrupt
and unpersuasive turn when Alex, now on her own in an NYU dorm,
decides to seduce Carter. That Carter would succumb to Alex I can
easily accept, but I have a harder time buying this
self-respecting young woman from a solid family so easily and
off-handedly tumbling into the sack with a twerp like Carter, and
one who has taken her father’s job at that. Granted an
understandable level of intrigue about what it would be like
not to be “cursed with a functional family,” as she
ironically puts it, this plot twist feels imposed by the
screenwriter, not freely chosen by the character.

Even more disappointing is the aftermath when Dan finds out.
Dan’s refreshingly forceful and direct response to Carter I
entirely understand and support, but his heart-to-heart with Alex
is a total cop-out: She expresses regret, but only for not being
honest with her father, and he apologizes for butting into
her business, and neither of them confronts the fact that what
she did was cheap and degrading. This paternal lapse critic
Jeffrey Overstreet insightfully contrasts with another scene in
which Carter expresses gratitude to Dan for “giving me a hard
time,” which, Carter observes, no one had ever taken the trouble
to do for him before. Granted, Alex has to spread her wings and
make her own decisions, but does that mean dad should simply
accept whatever decisions she makes without ever giving her a
hard time again? Isn’t that part of the “curse of
functionality” that Carter envies in the Foreman family?

Despite this substantial misstep, it can’t be said that the
film quite condones Alex and Carter’s affair, whereas it does
celebrate the stable domesticity of the Foreman household. “How
do you do it?” Carter asks Dan at one point. Dan’s colorful
answer won’t be embroidered on any pillows anytime soon, but I
must admit he points to an important part of the secret of a
successful marriage in a memorable way: “You just pick the right
woman to be in the foxhole with… and when you’re out of the
foxhole you keep your d— in your pants.”

Dan brings this same plain-spoken common sense to the
buzzword-laden corporate-speak (“synergy,” “psyched,” etc.) now
in vogue at his office (most pointedly in a farcical scene
featuring Malcolm McDowell’s guru-like CEO Teddy K, who excels at
creating an aura of significance with impressive-sounding but
meaningless generalities).

Here, too, the film occasionally missteps: In one scene Dan
criticizes Carter for telling employees they’ve been “let go”
instead of telling them they’re “fired,” arguing that the
euphemism comforts the one doing the firing, not the one being
fired. Dan’s high-minded objections are comically deflated in a
later scene that finds him reaching for the same euphemism — but
the larger point is that people really would rather be
“let go” than “fired,” since “fired” strongly implies termination
for cause, whereas “let go” is more neutral as to the reason for
termination. More often than not, though, Dan’s disparaging
observations hit home.

Few if any actors working today could inhabit this character’s
skin as persuasively and engagingly as Dennis Quaid. In such
recent films as The Rookie and
Frequency, Quaid has become
the ideal older leading man, rugged, decent, and down to earth.
Watching Quaid in In Good Company, it occurred to me that
he’s doing the kind of work that Harrison Ford might have matured
into if he hadn’t squandered the last decade or more of his
career making dreck like Hollywood Homicide and
What Lies Beneath. (Of
course Quaid has his share of bad films too, including one in theaters right now, but
on balance Quaid has certainly made better choices.)

Grace, in his biggest role to date, has perhaps the trickiest
and most ambiguous of the three lead roles, and he more than
rises to the challenge. His character is caught between Dan and
Alex, and he has to be at once shallow and appealing, intimidated
by Dan but credibly attractive to Alex. Carter comes with obvious
resonances with Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, and,
while Grace is a very different actor from the young Dustin
Hoffman, he doesn’t suffer for the comparison. As for Johanssen,
she has less to work with than in such films as Lost in
Translation and Girl with a Pearl Earring, but she
provides the strong third corner required for the film’s triangle
of relationships, and has ample chemistry of the appropriate sort
with each of her male costars.

If In Good Company falls somewhat sort of the full
potential of its ambitious range of themes and promise, it’s
still a mostly honorable effort and an enjoyable film, and critic
Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com is onto something when she writes that the film “always feels like a
movie made for adults, which is more than you can say about so
many contemporary Hollywood comedies.” It’s not as sharp or
quirky as About a Boy, but it has a stronger moral center,
and the same humane, thoughtful approach to characters and ideas
is at work.