'Company of Men' Proves Painful

"In the Company of Men," the 1997 independent film now playing at the Dome Cinema, is one of the most outwardly repellent movies you could imagine. It's a stone-cold document of the vile lizard brain that lives at the base of our highly evolved social and psychological structures. It is, in short, an unsettling experience -- but a powerful one, a deliberate provocation to some hard thinking.


The plot is simple, and brutal. Two young corporate up-and-comers, Chad and Howard (Aaron Eckhart and Matt Malloy), are sent from headquarters to a regional office on temporary assignment. Howard is reeling from a recent break-up, and Chad wickedly suggests a plan to revenge them both on womankind: they'll find a girl ("someone vulnerable"), they'll both woo her, then when she's hooked, they'll dump her, just for the hell of it, just for the hurt of it.


Chad is clearly the Mephistopholean engine of the scheme; Howard, more timorous in every respect, goes along. And in Christine (Stacy Edwards), they find their perfect mark. She's lonely, lovely, trusting -- and deaf. They court her; Chad, devilishly handsome, is particularly adept at playing the "sensitive guy," while mocking her cruelly behind her back. She begins to fall for Chad; Howard begins to fall for her; the plot rolls coldly on toward its cleverly devised twist ending.


Meanwhile, we watch parallel processes of deceit and remorseless inhumanity at work in the business arena. And what, exactly, is the business? It's never made clear, and it's not important. We're in the ubiquitous office culture here, the cubicle world, where the means and matter of production are interchangeable and irrelevant; the only thing that counts is management, the efficient administration of profit.


It is this angle which opens up writer-director Neil LaBute's film and save s it from being merely a clinical examination of the depths of male depravity. Chad and his ilk degrade women (and other men) because they are themselves degraded by a culture of degradation: the white-collar ethos, the careerist way, the corporatic civilization strapped across our backs.


Now whether you buy this angle or not is another matter. If you don't, the movie will be nothing more than a well-wrought piece of sadism. If you do -- or at least believe that LaBute has made a plausible case, something worth considering -- then you'll find the movie a sternly moral work: destructive, yes, but only in the Voltairean sense, as a tool to raze rotting structures and prepare the ground for something better. Either way, it's a bitter pill to swallow. And many people, quite rightly, will not be able to stomach its depiction of cruelty toward women. There is a point when destructive morality begins to do more harm than good. "In The Company of Men" hovers dangerously close to that point.


The Jackal


There is no destructive morality, however, at the heart of "The Jackal," which opens at the American House of Cinema on Friday. It's just a great big gob of mindless Hollywood hokum: big stars, big locations, big explosions, big yawns.


Bruce Willis is the Jackal. (I know, he's a jackass, but that's real life. This is the movies. Sort of.) He's a highly skilled, supersecret terrorist who tends to do things in the most boneheaded, attention-getting way possible. He's been hired by the Russian Mafia (bet you've never seen them in one of these here adventure-type movies before, have you?) to kill the head of the FBI, or something. For some reason, the feds have to use an Irish terrorist (played by that famous Irishman, Richard O'Reilly MacDonagh Cuchulain Gere) to catch him.


If you'd like to see Willis in a variety of paunch-tucking disguises or hear Gere putting on the brogue, then this is the movie for you. For a more pleasant alternative, however, may we suggest a nice, brisk bout of root canal work.