The Company Men is a film that may have been overlooked by many movie goers, thanks in part to its lousy poster and poor publicity. But it deserves better, and should be seen by anyone who has ever looked for a job in today's business climate.

It is about people getting fired . . . not the assembly line workers or home builders, but the execs who get the axe in the downsizing / outsourcing / off-shoring mentality that pervades today's large corporations, which care little about loyalty, experience or humanity in general.

So devoted are they to the bottom line that their people become shrikes, shedding crocodile tears while announcing the latest rounds of layoffs, and manipulating their televised image via slick ads and remote control spokespersons who feed us the company line.

And you might say, "Who cares," but I think we should all have a look at these kind of people as well — the hi-flying upper management types who get the six-figure salaries, and the seven-figure bonuses, who shuttle around in the company jet, laying the groundwork for their next acquistion or merger, so they can lay off more workers, reduce their healthcare costs and other benefits, to help finance their new corporate headquarters with larger conference rooms and more opulent executive suites with even grander views of all their fellow corporate towers. What happens when those people get fired ?

Ben Affleck, in his role as the central character, Bobby Walker, is credible in two regards — first, in that he shows off his complete lack of acting range quite remarkably well. Here is the same person we saw in Pearl Harbor and Good Will Hunting with little variation, which, in my estimation, makes him all the more believable, in that he is as flat and two dimensional as the actual people in the corporate world, even though one expects more from a movie actor. But playing the same character in all of his films worked well for John Wayne . . . so it may have durability for Affleck, too.

Expectations of superb acting, however, are met, with the likes of Tommy Lee Jones as Gene McClary, the top level executive who started with the company from its beginnings, and Chris Cooper as Phil Woodward, also of the early days, both of whom are "let go" in one of the downsizing rounds when the bean counters in their power ties start crossing off people's names.

And this is where this story really triumphs . . . an empathetic look at what happens when the wealthiest of human beings are cast aside by today's business ethic, and we are afforded a look at a select few of those who were once part of that lifestyle, but now have been relegated to the dark realms of unemployment, forced to slog through all the insincere crap that awaits all job seekers these days, from the fat-assed HR types with their robotic formulaic responses recited during a job interview, to the many companies that don't even have the courtesy to acknowledge that you even applied for a job with them, and the massive discrimination against older applicants that officially doesn't exist, but is pre-dominant in the non-hiring process of the current business world. Believe me, I know.

This screenplay gives me exactly what I wanted . . . a look not only at all the blue collar people who are scrambling to stay afloat after being let go from their jobs, but also, a look at the high-roller types who have been fired as well. It is through their frustrations and their words that we hear exactly what we would like to say to all the phoney and insincere horseshit that we encounter in the job-seeking process, dealing with we laughingly refer to as "Human Resources." It is anything but; believe me, I know.

And so, my hat is off to the characters of this movie, such as Kevin Costner, in an uncharacteristically sarcastic and unkind role as a house renovator, the kind of guy who does actual "work" for a living and knows how hard it is to put food on the table, and who uses every family occasion to express his contempt for the wealthy executives who have forgotten what work really is because they are too busy moving jobs to Asia.

And I must also acknowledge Craig T. Nelson, looking very Spiro Agnew in his portrayal of the CEO of GMX, Conners, who cuts loose his best friends to maintain a lifestyle in which he can enjoy the "$500 lunches and the $5,000 hotel suites." He was spot-on perfect as that kind of human being, so-called, who run the banks and all related corporations of our day and age, the kind of people who issue robo-signed "variable-rate" mortgages, then sell those mortgages in a bundle to some overseas financial "group," then hedge their bets that these bundles of debt, pawned off as assets, will fail. And when they do fail, they foreclose on the home owners, then turn to the taxpayers for help when they get "over-leveraged", then give themselves lavish bonuses for their brilliant leadership to the ruination of not only their own companies, but for all the retirement pensions that evaporated in the process, leaving millions of people in the lurch, and then have the absolute gall to warn us about the "dangers of Socialism."

These are the kind of people who run the corporations which air commercials on Sunday mornings about how "they're working to rebuild America." Those kind of people, the inhumane thieves and scoundrels who run America today, men . . . and women as well, who are now fully equal, in that the women have become equally as hard-bitten, dishonest, ruthless, inhuman, dominant, greedy, treacherous and gender-biased in their pursuit of avarice as any of the men at the top which they replaced. It was the unemployed male demographic that defeated Carli Fiorina and Meg Whitman in the last California election, and with good reason.

It is all made very clear in The Company Men, and that is why this movie shines.

-- Thomas Ormsby