Mixed Company film one-sided and lacking

In the Company of Men

If you have heard anything about Neil LaBute's debut film In the Company of Men, it probably sounded very controversial. Winning the award for Best Dramatic Film at 1997's Sundance festival, audiences were shocked, outraged and disgusted by the depiction of the business world in this low-budget morality tale. LaBute's parable focuses on Chad, a man who lies, schemes and victimizes his way to success in a heartless, male-dominated corporate world.

In the Company of Men plays as a nightmare of corporate ideology taken to the extreme, an extreme which none of the characters question, nor struggle with, but only accept. The audience must distance themselves from the moral repugnance of the story to recognize that these characters are only distortions of a reality which in other contexts (such as the elite world of high powered corporations) seem perfectly acceptable to our society.

The film starts with Chad, the symbolic face of corporate evil and competitive amorality, manipulating his best friend Howard into toying with an innocent office assistant. This game originates as a way for the men to revenge themselves against women who have emotionally wounded them, and LaBute uses the scenario as a way of speaking about the state of relationships in the business world.

Chad's value system, based on the size of a man's balls and willingness to win regardless of the consequences, mimics the corporate ethos of results and productivity over humanity.

The characters in LaBute's scenario are simplistic, one-sided stereotypes rather than dynamic personalities.

In an interview with the New York Times, LaBute referred to Chad as "personified evil," motivated only by an undirected anger at the world. This type of character, usually found only as the villains of horror or action films, seems psychologically shallow in a dialogue-based morality play.

LaBute doesn't endow his characters with a trait we come to expect in the independent, intellectual, dialogue-based film: self-reflection or inquisitiveness. Chad blindly hates, Howard blindly follows; neither challenges the amorality which the business world has fostered onto their personalities.

LaBute continues this one-side ddepiction of his characters with Christine, the secretary Chad and Howard manipulate, who not only appears delicately attractive, but gains additional audience sympathy by being deaf. This choice, a plot tactic to affect the audience with pity for the woman, places even the physicality of the only woman in the film as inferior to the men, who privately taunt and mimic her disability.

LaBute refuses to tackle women characters, creating a company controlled and populated only by men who are alienated from females. Like the characters themselves, the plot is one-sided, depicting only the aggression of men who seem emotionally immature and frightened. Because these characters are so poorly developed psychologically, their behavior can only be seen as an extension of the corporate world in which they operate.

Morally, In the Company of Men raises interesting issues by representing the business world as a pack of predators who use words as weapons to sow guilt, insecurities and deceit. In terms of the film's construction, LaBute deviates from traditional movie making conventions in both plot and style. The shots are lingering, distanced views of stylized and anonymous locations. The dialogue unfolds dramatically in inspired soliloquies and trite, easily predictable conversations. The world which this film depicts is as one-sided and flat as the characters which populate it.

In the Company of Men differs from Hollywood movies emphasizing the bleakness of its characters and world without any attempt to sugarcoat it for audience. As such, watching In the Company of Men is not always the most engaging or entertaining of activities, but this isn't to say that the film does not have interesting things to say if viewed as a metaphor commenting on reality, and not as a depiction of reality itself.

In the Company of Men is showing today at 7:30, 9:30 and 11:30 p.m. at Kettering.