Movie Review | In Good Company
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten

MODA MAG.COM -- If movies are supposed to reflect life albeit through a fine
distiller, it's a wonder how few pics are made about how we
work.  After all, if you have a 40-hour work week with two weeks
off and thirteen holidays free during each year, you're putting in
1,736 hours per annum.  Is work–which is supposed to fulfill
us–so dull that filmmakers shun stories about the office?
‘Twould be a pity for you to miss one of the great comedies this
year, Alain Comeu's "Fear and Trembling" about a young
European woman (played by Silvie Testud) who is interning with
a Japanese company in Tokyo, and who, try as she may, is
dumped upon day after day because she's just not one of them.
In one of the best comedies of the decade, Mike Judge's "Office
Space," a very funny Ron Livingston plays a computer
programmer who hates his job, expresses his disgust with the
company to an officer sent by headquarters to chop heads, and
ironically is promoted for his honesty.

As office satires go, Paul Weitz's "In Good Company," the title
serving as ironic counterpoint in both describing the corporation
and letting us eavesdrop on social relations, is directed in a
conventional manner, presumably suitable for TV as well as the
cinema.  Young Topher Grace evokes both laughter and
sympathy as a 26-year-old, Carter Duryea,  who is sent by a
major mogul to increase ad volume in the big guy's sports
magazine but finds himself the superior officer to a man twice
his age, Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid).  The sad point made by
the film is that while corporate reorganization may increase the
holy bottom line, restructuring causes havoc with human beings
who may have worked for the same company for five, ten,
twenty years or more and are now sent to pasture.  Not only
that: those in the upper reaches of management, like Dan–a
hotshot exec who must sell ad space in the magazine to
survive–are getting substantially more pay than the youths
working in the office.  Their heads are the first to roll, a truism
that keep Dan plugging away despite his demotion since he has
major bills to pay, what with his 18-year-old daughter, Alex
(Scarlett Johansson) starting college at NYU and a new baby on
the way.

If you're a regular moviegoer, you'll recall the most recent time
you saw Topher Grace–as the young, laid-back applicant to
Columbia University who, after being seduced by the director of
admissions (played by Laura Linney) shortly after their interview,
phoned his mom to say, "I think it went pretty well."  If he is the
straight man in "P.S.," he's the comic center in Paul Weitz's
movie as a guy who despite his success in office politics is a
mess at home.  His wife has just left him after seven months of
marriage, and a lonely Carter Duryea virtually invites himself to
a Sunday dinner at the home of his subordinate, Dan Foreman,
where he meets and ultimately beds Dan's college-freshman
daughter to the dismay of her dad.

Weitz makes good use of the supporting players, who include
David Paymer as the newly fired Morty and Philip Baker Hall as
Eugene Kalb, the man who can save Dan's job by investing big
ad money in the magazine.  Remi Adefarasin is responsible for
the nice New York photography, his camera virtually making
love to the alluring and seductive Scarlett Johansson.

Grade: 7/10