Review

Review Date: 23-January-05
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

In Good Company (2004)

How many Carter Duryeas are out there?

That's the thought I took away from "In Good Company," Paul Weitz's soft-spoken drama about the effects of high finance and high tech on old-fashioned values and the families that embody them. The central character, Carter Duryea (Topher Grace), is a 26-year-old hotshot tapped by a megacorporation to manage ad sales for its newly acquired sports magazine. Judging strictly by tangible assets, Carter is a success at a very early age, but by any other yardstick he's a disturbed child whose social and emotional retardation renders him alternately horrifying and pathetic. Watching him, I kept thinking how mother animals teach their young the skills for life (hiding, hunting, keeping clean) and how human parents and societies must do the same, or face a sort of extinction. Has that time come? Are there thousands of creatures like Carter in our urban wilds who, having had no nurturing to speak of, scrounge their goals and their resources from marketing and mass media? Are piggy banks the new security blanket? Is Starbucks at the end of the rainbow? How many apprentices does Donald Trump have?

Carter is so completely ill-equipped to relate to other human beings that he falls back on canned marketing pitches even when trying to convince his wife not to leave him. His failure on that account heralds the beginning of an upsetting (though ultimately beneficial) time for him, as his worldview collides with that of Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid), a veteran salesman who enjoys a happy home with a wife, two teenage daughters, and a baby on the way. With his honesty, civic responsibility, and traditional masculinity (all of which Quaid nails to a tee), Dan represents not only the father figure Carter never had but also the antithesis to "Teddy K" (Malcolm McDowell), the fatuous, myopic tycoon upon whose whims whole lives are raised up and cast down in the name of progress. Stumbling along his narrow little road, Carter can't help but find Dan's life completely magnetic and Dan's eldest daughter (Scarlett Johansson) an irresistible piece of that life he would be grateful to call his own.

"In Good Company" won't win any awards for complexity, and its optimism about the triumph of good old American integrity might strike some as simplistic (or even hypocritical: there is a ton of money-grubbing product placement in the film, which, I am mortified to say, actually determined what I ate for dinner after seeing it). Yet there is no arguing that the moral of the story rings true. The "synergy" of which Teddy K so cryptically speaks doesn't lie in capitalism but in community. The world would be a better, healthier place if people were brought up and sustained by Dan Foreman's principles of devotion and candor, and if the Carter Duryeas learned their life lessons before they set out to make their first million or buy their first Porsche.

Copyright © 2005 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.