The Company Men is the unpleasant but deeply poignant story of three successful corporate executives (Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones and Chris Cooper) in a Boston shipping and manufacturing conglomerate with 60,000 people on the payroll who suddenly find themselves sacked--victims of the economic recession. After a money-saving bloodbath that reaches every level of the company, Bobby Walker (Affleck), a 12-year transportation exec on his way to becoming a CEO, loses more than his job. With a beautiful wife, two kids, two cars and a hefty mortgage on a great house in the suburbs filled with every accessory from the pages of Architectural Digest, Bobby enters the stages of denial, anger and false confidence, feeling emasculated and finally defeated.

Gene McClary (Jones), the No. 2 man in power, is doubly humiliated because he founded the company and now he's been undermined, betrayed and lied to by the CEO (Craig T. Nelson), who was also his best friend and former college roommate. Equally embarrassing is the fact that the sexy corporate vampire who fired him (a hardball performance by tough, curvaceous Maria Bello) is also the woman he's been committing adultery with. Gene stands to make a lot of money from stock options, but he cares more about the loss of antiquated values like friendship, building something together, development and growth, being part of a "business community." Co-worker Phil Woodward (Cooper), the oldest of them all, discovers his gray hair, experience and service as a war hero in Vietnam have no merit in today's unemployment lines. He is considered redundant baggage. One of the saddest lines in the film is when he says, "My life ended and nobody noticed."

The Company Men does a piercing job of making you feel the dehumanizing effects that losing a job can have on grown men, but it's more truthful and devastating than that. It explores the myriad ways good people find the strength to pick up the pieces and recalibrate priorities when they get the wind knocked out of their sails, when they lose the things--cars, appliances, tools, charge accounts, technological gadgets, gym memberships, the stuff--that define their lives. This theme is cut from the same bolt of cloth as the punchier, more entertaining Up in the Air, but The Company Men shows the more brutal effects of downsizing in a cruel business world run by greed and profit losses. It's happening to thousands of people every week (there's an interesting long shot of Tommy Lee Jones in a glass window on the executive floor gazing down on the parking lot as various employees from every rung on the company ladder carry out potted plants, family photos and other office contents in cardboard boxes). The film explores the desperate phases men in their 60s go through to make ends meet while keeping up appearances, the relationships with their confused families, the motivational speakers who take their money to teach them how to get their enthusiasm back--always fearing there is somebody younger waiting in the wings with no tuitions or house payments, willing to work for less money and more hours. After months of false promises, Bobby goes from a top managerial position to selling his Porsche, moving his family into his parents' house and working for his blue-collar brother-in-law (a pluperfect Kevin Costner, replete with Boston accent) in the construction business. Phil grows tired of dyeing his hair to get rid of the gray, leaving everything prior to 1990 off his résumé and staying away from home until after 6 p.m. because his wife doesn't want the neighbors to know he was fired. It's a sad thing when life passes you by and you can't afford to keep it going.

It's Tommy Lee Jones, with the verve and determination to start over showing visibly in his eyes and jaw, who saves the day in a way I will not give away. No spoilers here, but just rest assured the film ends on an uplifting note, demonstrating the undefeatable human spirit in ways that will make you cheer. Writer-director John Wells proved himself as a man of quality and taste on television, raising the bar by creating ER, but a movie as dynamic and compelling and relentlessly gripping as The Company Men is an absolute triumph for a feature-film debut. It's a marvelous picture, a perfect mirror to today's corporate snake pit, where people are just figures on a balance sheet, and to the people we observe daily, severed from their jobs for no reason and drifting into a bleak future--but with a hopeful, promising and responsible resolution that did not seem to me like a Hollywood cop-out at all. Enhanced 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.

rreed@observer.com

THE COMPANY MEN
Running time 113 minutes
Written and directed by John Wells
Starring Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Kevin Costner

3.5/4

I’m the first to admit that I went into Where the Wild Things Are with perhaps too high expectations. I blame part of this on the most excellent trailer—remember that teaser, released back in March, full of sumptuous, wondrous images set to that infectious Arcade Fire song? It seemed (regardless of the chatter over delays and studio clashes that has followed this project around) to be a perfect combination of parts: Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book; director Spike Jonze, the wacky mind behind Being John Malkovich and Adaptation (not to mention some of the best music videos around. And hey, remember music videos?); co-writer (with Jonze) Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and co-writer of the charming Away We Go. Plus, have you taken a good look at this Max Records kid, who plays Max in this movie? He has the most sweetly melancholic face—one can’t imagine him just walking into an audition. It seems more likely that the twee trinity of Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola and Mr. Jonze all joined forces to cook up his genetics, Gattaca-style.

The film starts off pitch-perfect. Young Max, just like in the book, is a mischievous boy who gathers snowballs to pelt his older sister and her friends, makes forts, throws tantrums, etc. But Mr. Jonze is also able to capture how long those childhood afternoons can drag, and how lonely being a kid can be. The rage that gets Max sent out of the room without dinner is more dramatic than it is in the source material (of course, it’s impossible to make a 100-minute movie to match a book that takes somewhere between one and three minutes to read), and is borne of a new backstory about a divorced mom and her new boyfriend (oh hi, Mark Ruffalo!). Suffice it to say, it’s not a mysterious forest that grows out of Max’s bedroom (bummer) but a fantastical journey that Max takes, which involves a seafaring passage that would make the Losties proud. And there, finally, is where we meet our Wild Things.

So here’s the thing: This movie looks so damn perfect. The sunshine filters beautifully through insanely tall trees, and those giant puppets are great-looking and move with a balletic grace that is fascinating to see. Yet once Mr. Jonze and Mr. Eggers depart from the bare-bones text, allowing the Wild Things to speak (it’s a little hard not to think of Tony Soprano when you hear James Gandolfini’s voice, even if it’s coming from a giant puppet), things get a little strange. The gang (which includes effective voice portrayals from Lauren Ambrose, Catherine O’Hara, Paul Dano and Chris Cooper) is less wild than they are unhappy, and there are some very adultlike gripes and resentments running through the creature community when Max arrives. Which is not to say there aren’t some truly inspired moments within the film (just wait till you meet Bob and Terry). But something doesn’t quite jell, and no matter how gorgeous each set piece is, it doesn’t always entirely add up to a complete and satisfying narrative. I couldn’t help but think, from time to time, how on earth were these guys allowed to make this movie?

This one is certainly not going to be for the Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs crowd. I can’t imagine any young kid seeing it, not just because parts of it are dark and kind of scary, but because I can’t imagine any small fry having the attention span to stick with it. Perhaps the target audience can be identified through the line of Where the Wild Things Are clothes, key chains and decorations available at … Urban Outfitters. 

svilkomerson@observer.com

With the movie scene currently dominated by so much dismal trash like Couples Retreat, Zombieland and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, it would be a treat to welcome an artistically viable valentine to the most dynamic city in the world with a huge star-studded cast. New York, I Love You is not it.

An eclectic group of 11 directors with varying degrees of talent play global leapfrog, skipping and jumping from Chinatown to Central Park to Greenwich Village to Coney Island to helm 11 overlapping stories about the Big Apple; it was completed in eight weeks. (A 12th, Scarlett Johansson, has been eliminated, for reasons never explained. Maybe her little vignette was too boring and empty to include, but it couldn’t be less satisfying or more inconsequential than some of the others included here.) This is the second in a continuing series of movies dedicated to the unifying theme of love in big cities from producer Emmanuel Benbihy (Paris, je t’aime). Next up at bat: Rio, Shanghai and Jerusalem, in what you might seriously call a true definition of vay izmir. The New York rule: Each director had a deadline of two days to complete his segment. The result is every bit as truncated and zigzaggy as you might imagine. The whole thing looks like it was edited with pinking shears.

Horrible, streaky, dizzying camera work leads you across the bridge into the city by taxi while two passengers argue about how to get to Brooklyn. The driver throws them out of his cab. In Chinatown, actor-director Wen Jiang, who co-starred with Gong Li in Red Sorghum and is often called “the Robert De Niro of China,” tells  the tale of a scruffy slacker pickpocket (Hayden Christensen) who follows a girl into a cafe, returns her stolen cell phone and gets into an argument with her boyfriend (Andy Garcia), whose wallet he has previously pilfered. Next, India’s Mira Nair enters the diamond district to film an encounter between a Hasidic bride-to-be (Natalie Portman) and a Hindu diamond merchant (Irrfan Khan), whose cultural differences find a shared common ground as they talk about everything from food restrictions to her shaved head. On the Upper West Side, a British musician (Orlando Bloom) works intensely to finish a score for an animated film, staying in touch with the outside world through cell phone calls from the director’s assistant (Christina Ricci), who insists he read two novels by Dostoyevsky in order to understand the project. He’s confused by this strange request, but when she shows up at his dark, grungy apartment to help him with his creative task, he learns a whole new meaning of Russian literature. Directed by Japan’s Shunji Iwai, who knows how to make two minutes feel like War and Peace.

The best story in the film comes from Yvan Attal, the Israeli-born French director and husband of gruesome-looking actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. It focuses on a fast-talking Soho pickup artist (Ethan Hawke) who puts the make on a sexy married woman (Maggie Q), without knowing she’s a professional hooker. Mr. Hawke’s seduction techniques are both charming and hilarious, giving the lie to the theory that Manhattan hustlers, from Times Square to the meatpacking district, have all the answers before you can even ask the questions. Moving uptown to Central Park, on the day of his senior prom, a heartbroken, lovesick 17-year-old kid (Anton Yelchin) goes to a pharmacist (James Caan) to buy condoms. The old man proposes the boy do a good deed for humanity by taking his crippled daughter (Olivia Thirlby) to the prom in her wheelchair. The dour mood shifts like a lightning strike after the dance, when they are forced to walk home through the park. The kid gets the romantic surprise of his life when the pitiful girl unexpectedly trains him in the nuances of handicapped sex. Little does he know she’s an actress, preparing for a role. In the most pretentious and incomprehensible vignette of all, written by Anthony Minghella, interrupted by his death and finished by Bollywood success Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth), the great Julie Christie plays a retired opera singer who checks into a posh hotel on the Upper East Side and shares a glass of Champagne with a crippled bellhop who brings her violets (Shia LaBeouf). He throws himself out of the window to his death, but when she reports it to the hotel manager (John Hurt), the body has disappeared. Before the weirdness ends, the suggestion is apparent that everything has either happened in the woman’s past or been a figment of her imagination. Pure twaddle.

There’s more, in a seemingly inexhaustible stream of pointless brushes with destiny. Two distraught lovers (Drea De Matteo and Bradley Cooper) speed toward one another across Manhattan, one by subway, the other on foot, as they try to figure out if their one-night stand might produce the same sparks the second time around. Cult director Allen Hughes and writer Xan Cassavetes, daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, collaborated on this one, which pants with energy and pace, if not content. Actress Natalie Portman returns, in the role of debut director, to frame the story of a black baby sitter who raises eyebrows as he escorts his charge, a pink and pretty all-American little girl, through Central Park on a sunny afternoon. Two housewives praise him for being a great male nanny, but when he returns the moppet to her mother at the end of the day, he turns out to be a ballet dancer—and the child’s real father.

And so it goes, with characters from one episode sometimes rubbing elbows with participants from another. The hooker who left Ethan Hawke on the curb in Soho drops off her lingerie in a Chinese laundry and is shocked when the next customer (Chris Cooper) speaks perfect Cantonese. On the boardwalk at Brighton Beach, Abe (Eli Wallach), an old man recovering from a broken hip, is doomed to endure the nagging of his annoying, mean-spirited wife of 63 years, Mitzie (Cloris Leachman). She’s the worst, but she’s all he’s got. The movie bounces back and forth between these characters like a game of table tennis. The vignettes are like a collection of New Yorker short stories, too often with little or no literary or cinematic trajectory, and almost always too fragmented to add up to anything substantial. There isn’t one that I would call involving enough to engage the emotions. The goal is to paint a colorful canvas of a sprawling metropolis with an ever-changing scenario thanks to a constantly fluctuating population. Unfortunately, it’s a portrait of “the city that never sleeps” that often needs a NoDoz. The very nature of New York’s vastness as a melting pot of contrasts makes it a natural for a movie like this, but it’s the movie’s downfall, too. So many stories to choose from, but hard to connect the dots.

The only thing New York, I Love You really proves is how difficult it is, in today’s culturally bankrupt film industry, for good actors to find jobs.

rreed@observer.com

The masks we all wear to hide our true intentions in matters of the heart are cannily exposed in Ira Sachs’ compactly directed, superbly acted Married Life. In this postwar period piece replete with great 1940’s cars, clothes and suburban organdy, domestic bliss is discreetly balanced with a simmering tale of jealousy, betrayal, adultery and murderous plans most foul. Four wonderful actors form a stylish equation as finely tuned as a string quartet.

In a lovely departure from his usual roles as rough-hewn neurotics whose faces need sanding, Chris Cooper plays Harry, a nerdy, middle-aged husband in the grip of male menopause whose happy marriage to his doting wife, Pat (the fabulous Patricia Clarkson), goes stale when he meets Kay, a gorgeous blonde 30 years younger (Rachel McAdams, who looks great in a June Allyson pageboy). Cowardly Harry wants to get rid of Pat without hurting her feelings, so he turns for advice to his carefree Manhattan bachelor pal Rich (Pierce Brosnan), who has been down every road before, and always knows the detours. Rich makes a couple of discoveries of his own: one is an accidental visit to the country that catches the loyal Pat in the arms of another man, the other is Kay. One look at this soulful Clairol ad and Rich is in love himself. Pat wouldn’t mind ridding herself of marriage, either, but spares Harry the pain of divorce. Rich, who is head over heels for Kay, would like to get rid of them both. The two buddies find themselves driven to villainy by their desire for the same woman. Murder is the only answer, and since Pat suffers from chronic indigestion, replacing her stomach powder with an overdose of aspirin could be fatal. Clearly, we are heading into Hitchcock territory.

This is interesting, since the very same story (based on a pulp novel by John Bingham) was a 1962 installment of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour called “The Tender Poisoner” with Dan Dailey, Jan Sterling and Howard Duff; it used photo-developing chemicals instead of aspirin. But the basic plot twists remain the same. After naïve Harry makes the dumb mistake of leaving lonely Kay in a remote cottage in the care of dashing, roguish Rich, she dumps him, and he’s got to beat the clock to get home before Pat swallows the lethal dose. Meanwhile, brainy, indestructible Pat, who is not as lovable and devoted as everyone thinks, has duplicitous plans of her own. What happens next is humorous, suspenseful and very entertaining. The accomplished actors are flawless: as one of the two competing lotharios, Mr. Cooper obscures a volcano of conflicting obsessions and tortured emotions behind a facade of nobility; Mr. Brosnan, a far cry from 007, is wry, suave and jealous to the verge of lunacy. Ms. McAdams, who bowled me over in the underrated Christmas movie The Family Stone, is a dream walking, and the always unpredictable Ms. Clarkson raises the tension level several notches on her own as she adroitly handles a myriad of deceptions with beguiling cool. Mr. Sachs directs them all with a keen appreciation of the space they need for character evaluation, and his script (co-written with Oren Moverman) makes even the lengthy dialogue scenes plausible and natural. Classic clips from My Favorite Husband and Martin Kane, Private Eye lend period flavor, and the soundtrack by Kay Starr, Doris Day and Offenbach’s “Barcarolle” doesn’t hurt, either. Stylish without being overly stylized, intelligent without being boring, Married Life is a classy throwback to the good old days when subtlety meant something at the movies and watching Hitchcock was a good reason to stay home.

The affable Mr. Grant, who is finally showing his age (agreeably, I must add) by playing something besides Peter Pan in an Armani suit, is Alex Fletcher, a washed-up rock ’n’roll has-been who once pounded his pelvis through countless hits in a 1980’s group called PoP! It’s been almost 20 years since he last made the charts, his wallet is as thin as a lemon twist in a green-apple martini, and he can’t even get a one-night gig at Knotts Berry Farm. Suddenly he’s approached by a current pop diva named Cora to write a song for her new CD. Cora, played with a style bordering on narcolepsy by newcomer Haley Bennett, like a hilarious combo of all the brainless Britneys and Jessicas on the Grammy scene today, wants to introduce the song at Madison Square Garden. Composing a new hit could be the comeback Alex has been praying (and braying) for, and he’s only got five days to do it. All he needs is a lyricist.

Enter Sophie Fisher (Drew Barrymore), the neurotic plant lady who waters his ferns. Sophie is not in the mood to write love songs. She’s still nursing a broken heart after being dumped by an N.Y.U. professor (Campbell Scott) who used the intimate details of their affair as material for his latest novel. The first half of the movie centers on the diabolical ways with which the desperate Alex talks the reluctant Sophie into becoming his writing partner. Think Marvin Hamlisch and Carole Bayer Sager and They’re Playing Our Song, with movie stars and production values. The second half follows them through all-night work jams, heated recording sessions, music videos, bouts of falling in and out of bed (and love), and ends up on the night of the big event at the Garden, where Alex bumps and grinds his way to stardom and ties together all the loose ends with the undulating verve of a middle-aged, arthritic Tom Jones. The vulgar, cheesy and idiotic rock numbers are the highlights of the movie, a terrific parody of the junk kids watch today on MTV, and Mr. Grant hams his way through them like Mick Jagger after a hip replacement.

There’s a lot to like here. Despite the silliness of the plot mechanics, Music and Lyrics, written and directed by Marc Lawrence, has a script that is admirably rooted in believability instead of sight gags and Will & Grace one-liners that nobody in real life could ever possibly say. A further advantage is the two stars, who demonstrate a chemistry that is rare in most of today’s comedy fiascos. Who needs jokes when you’ve got a pair this huggable? With her steno pad and her watering can, Ms. Barrymore is a marzipan kewpie doll waiting to get munched. The furtive, scruffy, self-adoring charm that Mr. Grant has been getting by on for years works to his advantage. He’s so retro he even has one of those waterbeds that come equipped with a barf bag. The singing and dancing in the overproduced musical finale is hilariously bad, and he’s a clumsy riot doing both—in front of thousands of extras. Nobody is more surprised than me, but I have to admit I found Music and Lyrics unexpectedly warm and ingratiating.

Into the Breach

Breach is a cold, gimlet-eyed dossier on the surveillance and eventual arrest of F.B.I. agent and secret Soviet spy Robert Hanssen. It’s about how the craftiest spy in the bureau was trapped and outsmarted by a boy young enough to be his son, and everything in it is the truth. It even begins with Attorney General John Ashcroft (remember him?) announcing Hanssen’s capture. But the story of what happened up to that point makes for an adventure so hair-raising that it challenges credulity.

Now considered the most dangerous enemy agent in the history of the bureau, Hanssen gave the appearance of a dour, no-nonsense, religiously obsessed family man. He was the last person in Washington anyone could suspect as a traitor, a security breach and a mole. But a special unit within the bureau had been following his clandestine movements for years, unable to nail him in the act of espionage. Meticulously written, realistically acted and suspensefully directed, Breach tells the story of the spy who eluded world experts and the young, ambitious office clerk who did what nobody else could do in bringing him to justice. Chris Cooper is magnificent as Hanssen, and Ryan Phillippe gets the role of his career as Eric O’Neill, the junior G-man whose patience, diligence and strategy outwitted and outlasted everyone else to beat him at his own game, risking his own life to do it.

At first, Eric thinks he’s been recruited by an F.B.I. task-force officer (Laura Linney, wasted here, but both efficient and effective as always) to spy on a sexual deviant. But when Hanssen takes a paternal interest, driving him to church, welcoming him and his wife into the family, and relying on him for the simplest trusts, Eric comes to like the guy. One creepy thing the movie does effectively is demonstrate how real spies are not comic-book villains, and Chris Cooper’s character is neither black nor white; he’s the perfect chiaroscuro. When Eric finally learns how many state secrets his boss has passed and how many deaths he has caused, it comes down on his conscience like a jackhammer. Downloading Hanssen’s Palm Pilot, watching Hanssen and his kind, thoughtful wife (Kathleen Quinlan) in pornographic videos, detaining him in traffic while the bureau searches his automobile, breaking into and resealing his mail while trying to hide his mission from his own wife (Caroline D’Havernas), Eric sweats through hell. The movie builds Hitchcockian tension leading up to the decisive finale, when Eric finally seals his boss’s fate on Sunday, Feb. 18, 2001—a day that will live in F.B.I. history. There’s an even bigger shock yet to come, but why spoil it? This is one of those movies to which you might want to bring smelling salts.

The painstaking moment-to-moment details and the claustrophobic device of putting the viewer inside the camera as the salient facts unfold are trademarks of the gifted director Billy Ray, who made the critically acclaimed journalism thriller Shattered Glass. As the film’s stoic moral compass, Ryan Phillippe works harder than ever, achieves more than I thought possible and earns respect. The uneasy feeling of claustrophobia extends to the eyes and pinched, painful expressions in Chris Cooper’s masterful portrayal of the enigmatic, elusive Hanssen. Breach is a tough, bare-knuckle look at the new cyber-terrorism that holds you captive from start to finish.

Valen-tunes!

Ben Vereen and Baby Jane Dexter are two performers as far apart as Anchorage and Austin. Yet they share kindred souls in their passionate approach to entertainment, and like space heaters, are both currently warming cold nights after dark on the Manhattan cabaret scene.

At Feinstein’s at the Regency, Mr. Vereen lacks the room to illustrate the precision steps that made him a Bob Fosse protégé, but he can still wiggle his thighs with the elegance of the late Avon Long. He’s not a jazz singer, but he does have an undeniable sense of rhythm and time that even improves banal songs from Hair, Pippin and the awful Jesus Christ Superstar that seem irrelevant out of context. Most of his song list aims to please the undemanding tastes of the musically unsophisticated (they are there in full force, shouting back from the expensive tables), but in his tributes to Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr., he strikes gold with ballads. Oddly, an over-arranged “Misty” is accompanied only by a snare drum without the snares, but most of the act is refreshingly devoid of frills. It’s autobiographically structured, but he doesn’t dwell on adversity, like the near-fatal 1992 motor accident that resulted in a stroke, or the predictions that he could never work again. I guess this is the season when every singer in town will be coughing up the dreary, overrated and ossified “My Funny Valentine.” He does it in three tempos, accompanied only by the thud of a bass, when even one is more than enough. Still, it’s always pleasant to spend time in the company of a survivor, a pro, and a performing prince. Ben Vereen is all three.

Holding court at the hot new Metropolitan Room at Gotham through Feb. 24, Baby Jane Dexter reminds me of colored lights, forbidden absinthe and big brass beds. If she’d lived in the New Orleans red-light district in a previous era, she would have been the most popular white girl in Storyville. Her specialty is hotfoot barrelhouse and wrist-slashing blues, which she wails like nobody’s business, and her fans lap it up like howling hound dogs, hungry for more. I always liked her raucous style, but I never expected to hear standards from the Great American Songbook in her repertoire. On this, the very best act of her career, she’s finally discovered classics by Kern, Hart and Johnny Mercer, too. And I’m happy to report that her lived-in baritone gives them a personal spin as unique as it is intense. On “Make Believe,” she phrases behind the beat. On “Some Enchanted Evening” there’s no beat at all; she doesn’t even follow Richard Rodgers’ melody. But she makes you feel the subtext of the emotions hiding in Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics. She sings a Harold Arlen song about a reefer man, a Leslie Bricusse–Anthony Newley song about a candy man, and a Lieber-Stoller song about a “Love Potion No. 9” with equal grit and aplomb. She also tells about her own 12-step program to overcome a fatal addiction to … frozen hot chocolates at Serendipity. Simply hilarious. Then, without a bathroom break, she wafts dreamily into a rapturous “Fools Rush In” heartbreaking enough to knock your socks off. The best way to appreciate her unusual musical candor is to stop resisting her and give in. Baby Jane just kind of overwhelms you. And bless her pointed head, she does not sing “My Funny Valentine.”