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"Not
only the best American picture of 2004, but also the most
grown-up movie to come from Hollywood in recent years."
-- Andrew
Sarris (New York Observer), the man who brought
auteur theory to the U.S. and now sits on his own
face during movies
In case it would’ve never occurred to you from the previews
that this movie’s primary foreground and backdrop is
the dystopia of a post-9/11 economy as opposed to romantic
and generational conflict, Topher Grace clues you in at the
twenty-minute mark with his seemingly innocuous comment “I’m
gonna go with the 9-11” in reference to the company
Porche. The tragicomic tale of a man (Dennis Quaid) struggling
against the permeation of synergy in all walks of life and
his subsequent loss of control and angst in the face of emasculation,
In Good Company expects us to be complicit in its old
school capitalist ethos and mancentric reality, which provoked
movie companion Jane to ponder stupified “Was this movie
made in the 80s?” But in an actual Reagan era time capsule
like T.Cruise’s Cocktail (not to be confused
with T.Cruise’s Risky Business, whose high
school story is more ambivalent than its adult counterpart)
there’s no questioning of the corporate rules inherited
from its fathers, whereas the tension shows in 80s movies
thawed out and released in the 90s (Meg Ryan’s Kate
& Leopold vs. You’ve Got Mail) or
the 00s (Kirsten Dunst’s Bring It On vs. Wimbledon).
But In Good Company takes its Cocktail/You’ve
Got Mail/Wimbledon stance with such gruff vigor that
it mimics the neocons’ nostalgia for the capitalism-good
communism-evil days of the Cold War: it’s an elegy for
less nuanced values, and a tender plea for a return to the
purity of ripping people off in the right way and a man-to-man
method of running the economy.
Hand
in hand with this is a misogyny that has to be seen to be
believed. Like Colin Hanks’ disturbingly possessive
brother in the bummin' Kirsten Dunst vehicle Get Over
It (filmed in Toronto [ed note: I was there! I stepped
on her foot! Twice!]), Quaid’s mancentric sexual rage
toward women in general is projected onto a member of his
immediate family. The inability to sexually control his daughter
is (I guess) both endearing and a trait common to all fathers,
which would explain why the movie plays misplaced patriarchal
lust as if he were flipping burgers on the backyard grill.
For example, at one point Quaid barges into a restaurant to
accost his daughter (Scarlett Johansson) and boss (Topher)
having dinner in a scene that is played as charmingly awkward
instead of totally horrifying: “ARE YOU SLEEPING WITH
HIM! TELL ME, ARE YOU SLEEPING WITH HIM!” he demands,
or, to paraphrase: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR PUSSY!
TELL ME, WHAT YOU ARE DOING WITH YOUR PUSSY!” [The synergistic
merging of his corporate and family lives is understandably
unnerving, but so’s his tone of voice]. Movie companion
Jane commented that Quaid’s behavior throughout might
be sympathetic if he were a raging alcoholic, since that would
place his obsession with his daughter’s vaginal whereabouts
in some kind of plausible irrational context. As it is, his
sobriety was surpassed only by my own as I squirmed and “meh”ed
under the movie’s a priori belief in my equating of
boorishness with charm — Quaid to phone: “Hello,
this is Mr. Foreman. If you give my daughter an alcoholic
beverage or a joint, I will hunt you down and neuter you.”
— which admittedly might work, if Quaid didn’t
come off as a poor man’s late-career Harrison Ford,
that is to say, twice removed from a mid-career Harrison Ford.
But the repeated use of ham-fisted spaghetti western style
extreme close-ups to imply something intensely masculine at
stake both undermines and overplays the movie’s faith
in our complicity, as does its use of other “psychological”
camera movements and angles employed to limit interpretation
of a scene, such as Quaid being literally belittled in a shot/reverse
shot confrontation with Topher, or Grace wide-eyed and wide-angled
as his wife (Selma Blair) walks out on him for being a solipsistic
prick.
It’s
with this latter point that the movie’s mise en scène
as it were achieves something in spite of itself, since Topher’s
house after she leaves becomes an uncanny representation of
his inner life, with a portrait of Selma hanging on the wall
but no Selma, and a picture of the house from the outside
but no pictures of anything outside it. This solipsism is
paired with corporate synergy via Topher’s position
as ambassador for the younger, more synergistically-inclined
generation, as well as through the inherent self-referential
drive of synergy to keep all tasks “in-house”.
What this critique does is reveal a perhaps oblivious ambivalence
toward the movie’s primary target. Although synergy
is portrayed as a destructive force, “synergy”
acts as a talismanic word during two important moments in
the movie. Early on, Topher’s absent utterance of it
snaps him out of a post-dumped-induced catatonia, imbibing
him with an air of authority that later leads to his overthrowing
of what granted him that power in the first place: synergy.
And near the end, Globecom CEO Teddy K (for Kapital?) gives
a speech to his underlings, the indeterminacy of which kind
of blew my mind: “Synergy: What does it mean?”
he asks, following it with corporate vague-isms like “This
is unbreakable. This is inevitable.” At which point
Quaid laughs, then spouts off a litany of self-aggrandizing
rhetorical questions demanding a return to the (I guess) inherent
morality of marketing, which appears to declare his and the
movie’s anti-synergistic victory in his/its portrayal
of integration as literally laughable – that is, until
Teddy K nullifies that victory with the following: “You
ask some damn good questions. And I’m leaving it to
you, all of you, to answer them.” The movie quickly
recovers from its indeterminate state, however, by firing
Topher’s pro-synergy boss, who, understandably dumbfounded,
speaks for himself and the audience: “It’s so
arbitrary. I feel used.” What’s led to this confusion/conclusion
is the movie’s faith in countering post-9/11 male ennui
and emasculation with the simplicity of Texas politics. It’s
a tender view of Bush by someone (e.g. writer/director/producer
Weitz) who’s familiar with his Christian swagger but
not his economic agenda. Quaid “believes” in sales,
and his belief succeeds, and (in addition to the aforementioned
masculine sympathies) Cowboy Bush’s influence is also
visible and audible in the collective wince of a sporting
injury, the playgroundish taunt “You pussies ready to
get schooled?”, and a coworker’s relief at being
rehired and “back in the saddle” as he mocks the
legitimacy of his wife’s interim breadwinning. But the
movie’s battle with synergy clashes with Corporate Bush’s
xtreme trickle-down policies, which favor the rights of corporations
over employees and consumers, with tax-breaks and no-bid contracts
encouraging an endless merging of the American economy into
one giant individual, spanning the globe, vertically integrated
forever. Or as Teddy K put it: “This is unbreakable.
This is inevitable.”
__________________________
side
notes: There’s also odd ethnic commentary popping up
here and there, like Topher’s use of a Latino janitor
as a puppet/prop in a marketing speech (reminiscent of Tom
Hanks’ use of a Latina grocery store clerk as a puppet/prop
in an impromptu Visa ad in You’ve Got Mail);
or the one moment of dialogue spoken by an African-American,
which seems included so as to state that authentic black people
are literate and smarmy and critical of the younger black
generation. Also odd is the complete ineffectuality of the
romantic montage sequences, which scenes reduce Johansson’s
affections for Topher to something like “Daddy I know
you love me but you can’t provide for me, so I’m
going to date your boss.” That Johansson later dismisses
the love between her and Topher as never extant seems to confirm
this reading of the movie’s romantic logic. |