In Good Company

Went home to Irvine today to visit my parents and get my several thousand filthy articles of clothing laundered at no cost to me. So while my boxers soaked and my grandmother recuperated from a nasty spill (more on this later), my father and I went to an afternoon screening of the newest film from Paul Weitz, the director best known for American Pie. He also directed About a Boy in 2002, and he continues here in that vein, awkwardly melding together drama and comedy. Fortunately, as with About a Boy, a solid cast of talented actors saves the film from utter mediocrity.



It's a shame In Good Company doesn't work better, as it deals with themes rarely seen in mainstream American cinema. Namely, the struggles of the middle-class suburban working people ekeing out a living in a marketplace dominated by mega-conglomerates run by young, arrogant snots. Though Company settles for raising a few issues before retreating into a familiar formula route, it's refreshing to see what could have been another dopey piece of Hollywood claptrap attempt to confront a contemporary issue at all.

Our story concerns Every Dad Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid), a great guy with a great sales job at a great sports magazine. Dan's on top of the world until life throws him two curveballs in a matter of days; his wife, who thought she had begun menopause, is pregnant, and his job is in jeopardy following the sale of his company to a massive multi-national corporation headed by the shadowy Teddy P. (Malcolm McDowell).

Even worse, following the merger, Dan's job is taken by young upstart Carter Duryea (Topher Grace) who, can you believe it, actually begins to date his fetching co-ed daughter Alex (the enormously fetching Scarlett Johannson).

And that's about it for story, really. Weitz' script is really an extended sitcom, developing a high-concept situation and then playing the characters off one another. And that's totally fine with me - plenty of great films have been made from what amount to sitcom premises, from Caddyshack to American Beauty. But, like most network sitcoms, the writing here is pretty slack. For a comedy, the film has a severe lack of actual jokes, or even humorous set-ups. I understand that the comedy is meant to flow from the characters, rather than elaborate gags or Farrelly Brothers style shenanigans.

But the dialogue takes on something of a drone after a while - the film is filled with appealing, likable and certainly attractive people, but they rarely struck me as particularly clever or even very smart. And in a film like this, driven by nothing so much as the main relationships between characters, witty dialogue could have helped enormously.

There are likewise some major problems on a conceptual level. In particular, it's hard to believe that Grace's character has risen so quickly through the corporate ranks to be able to take over as head of the ad department of a major, Sports Illustrated-esque publication. His performance retains all the twitchy uncertainty of his Eric Foreman character on "That 70's Show." As well, at around the hour mark, the film completely switches gears, moving its focus from the growing bond between Dan and Carter to the romantic entanglement of Carter and Alex. Though Grace and Johannson do their best with the material, there's very little actual chemistry between them on screen, a problem magnified by the overuse of dippy, stock montages showing the two of them falling for one another.

The shift in focus likewise robs the film of its greatest strength, the Dennis Quaid performance. In the past few years, Quaid has made something of a comeback to big-time acting after spending most of the 90's muddling about in a string of forgettable duds (Dragonheart, I'm looking in your direction). In Good Company features some of his strongest work to date. Dan Foreman as written could have been a dreadfully dull character - he's so nice and good and reliable, he could be played either as some sort of fantastical saint or as, well, a moron.

But Quaid takes a different tack, instilling him with a temper and also a wry sense of humor. There's just enough of a dark side there to make him interesting, and almost all of the film's best moments involve little notes Quaid adds to elevate the material. (One example: during a very typical movie "dinner scene," Carter accidentally spills a soda all over Dan. It's a dumb visual joke, but Quaid adds just the right mixture of frustration and self-effacing humor, and gets one of the film's biggest laughs.)

Though I've always liked Quaid as an actor, I can't say his latest string of films instills me with confidence. Hopefully, he'll attach himself to another project like Traffic or Far From Heaven, something that really gives him something to work with, a character worth playing. I can see what attracted him to this film - how often do movie stars get to play Regular Joes with real jobs dealing with the everyday struggles of modern life honestly? Never. But this script needed another few polishes before being ready for Prime Time.

One final note about the direction: it pretty much stinks. I was not a huge fan of About a Boy, but it was a film with a solid visual look that was efficiently, professionally made. The pacing in In Good Company feels frightfully sluggish, particularly during the final 20 minutes. In part, this is due to the aforementioned overuse of montages, that continually take you out of the action of the movie. There's not a memorable shot or interesting image in the movie, really, and nary an attempt to make it look like a film as opposed to a TV sitcom. It's a film practically designed to watch on a small TV in your bedroom on HBO some day.

As well, though Stephen Trask is credited for providing original music, most of the film's soundtrack includes poorly-chosen indie rock songs that don't really relate to the action of the film. This is particularly odd considering that perhaps the most memorable aspect of About a Boy was the terrific use of an original soundtrack by indie rocker Badly Drawn Boy. Here, songs by The Shins and Soundtrack of Our Lives are thrown about willy-nilly, whether or not they relate at all to the action on screen. It's strange and distracting. Why not just have a nice original piece of music to offset the action?