by: Josh Marks
“In Good Company” is an old-fashioned morality tale set in the age of global
corporations and hostile takeovers. Writer-director Paul Weitz
and brother/producer Chris Weitz (“About a Boy,”
“American Pie”) have taken this seemingly vapid environment and filled it with
an excellent cast and a character-driven story. The movie is at its best when
it focuses on the sometimes awkward, hilarious and poignant interactions
between the characters and how they deal on a larger scale with the principals
the film attempts to convey.
Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid) has a great life. He has
been the head of advertising sales at Sports America magazine for the past 20
years, has a great wife, Ann (Marg Helgenberger), and a smart and beautiful daughter, Alex (Scarlett Johansson), who is transferring to NYU.
Everything is going smooth until a large multimedia company takes over his
magazine and demands more ad revenue and less
employees. His sudden job insecurity is intensified when 26-year-old Carter
Duryea (Topher Grace) is assigned to clean house.
Duryea waltzes into both Foreman’s professional life as his new boss and
personal life when he sleeps with his daughter Alex.
While Foreman’s initial reaction to the situation is humiliation and anger, he
eventually sees through Duryea’s confident façade and forms a father-son bond.
He notices that underneath it all Duryea is a scared kid with enormous doubts
about his identity and what he wants to do with his life. Foreman teaches
Duryea some important lessons about family and how to be ethical and honest in
the business world.
The working title of “In Good Company” was “Synergy,” which is a term that is
cynically used in a speech by the head of the multimedia company to justify the
corporate merger and downsizing of Sports America. In a more genuine sense
however, it has to do with mutual effort or teamwork – something both Duryea
and Foreman learn in the end. It is one of the central messages in this modern day
morality tale, which stays focused on how the characters work out their
professional and personal dilemmas in spite of themselves.