Movie Review: In Good Company

In Good Company

In Good Company has been garnering suprisingly good reviews for what appeared to me to be a fairly typical date movie. Thanks to those reviews and the fact that it was conveniently showing in the same building and right after another movie I was seeing, I decided to go. I'll tell you now that it was a good thing it was convenient. If I'd gone to any trouble and spent the money on a ticket besides, I wouldn't have been too happy about it.

Dennis Quaid (Dan Foreman) is a middle-aged man who has achieved some success in corporate America coupled with a certain satisfaction with his personal life. He's the advertising manager for Sports America magazine which is coming off its best year ever; his two daughters are relatively well-adjusted good kids, and he's still in love with his pretty wife, Ann (Marg Helgenberger). But upheavals in every facet of Dan's life are in store as, in rapid succession, he learns the magazine has been sold to a congolmerage called Globecom, his wife is unexpectedly pregnant, and his oldest daughter, Alex (Scarlett Johansson) has been accepted as a transfer student to NYU. Now Dan is afraid he'll lose his job even as the expenses of a new baby and high tuition loom in his immediate future.

As it turns out, Dan's not fired, but he is demoted to make way for a 26 year-old marketing powerhouse named Carter Duryea (Topher Grace). Knowing he can ill afford to be unemployed, Dan does his best to play along with whatever his new boss tells him to do. But layoffs and changes he considers bad moves don't come easy for him. Meanwhile, Carter appears confident enough on the outside, but is having some real problems of his own. His fickle wife of just seven months (Kimberly, played by Selma Blair) walks out on him, and he finds himself at loose ends in the big city. Coincidentally, he runs into Alex who is also alone in the big city during her first days at her new school, and the pair soon begin a relationship that both try to keep secret from Dan.

Dan somehow copes with his on-the-job stress, his wife's difficult pregnancy, and his daughter's move. But what will he do if he discovers his boss and his daughter are dating? And what will happen if Globecom's mogul owner Teddy K (Malcolm MacDowell) decides he might like to buy or sell a few more companies and hire or fire a few more managers?

I think that Dennis Quaid is a terrific actor, which is one reason I'm so disappointed to see him in this movie. It's beneath him and his talents. Topher Grace is making a real name for himself as a movie actor, parleying his television fame into what will likely prove a lucrative film career. Although he's quite good playing characters like Carter Dureyea, I suspect that he, too, is better. Scarlett Johansson appears very much a fish out of water in this film. She looks like neither of her movie parents, and she looks and sounds too mature to be playing a confused teenager. Hers is not a matter of talent or a lack thereof, but of a real casting mistake. The rest of the cast is okay; it's the movie that's not.

In Good Company has fine production values and decent direction. It has a capable cast. What it doesn't have is a story of a script that rise anywhere above the strictly ordinary. In Good Company is a rental at best.

POLITICAL NOTES: Though the moralizing speeches are somewhat ham-handed in the film, there's something to be said for bringing attention to the global congolmerates that place the bottom line above all else. While businesses are in business to make money, they don't stay in business for long when they're in and out of business only as quickly as they can turn a profit. The American predilection for doing just that kind of business is why Japan, with its stockholders' willingness to hold out for long term profitability, is kicking the rest of the world where high technology is concerned. Americans invented VCRs and virtual reality; Japan took the former market handily and is on its way to owning the latter. Those Americans declining to invest in nanotechnology might take note that Japan has begun making significant investments in that arena while Americans dabble and dally at best.

FAMILY SUITABILITY: In Good Company is rated PG-13 for "some sexuality and drug references." The references are oblique or condemning, however, so I can't see anything objectionable in the movie for those of about age 10 and up. My bet is that young teens will like this movie better than either younger or older patrons, and that grown-ups will probably not care much for it at all.