In the Company of Men
By Jonathan Rosenbaum
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I could cite dozens of other examples, but I’ll focus on one that seems especially relevant to two of my other favorite films at Cannes, Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter and Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men: a refusal or reluctance in reviews to mention or discuss capitalism itself. I suppose this self-censorship may be unconscious because of the omnipresence of capitalism–discussing it may be as superfluous as discussing the air while describing a landscape. But not discussing capitalism makes for strangely skewed readings of both movies.
Put simply, In the Company of Men describes the effects of aggressive competition in business on masculinity and romance, and The Sweet Hereafter (which is likely to turn up here later this year), adapted by Egoyan from a Russell Banks novel, evokes the effects of aggressive competition in litigation on the functioning of a community. But in what I’ve read so far–and LaBute’s film has been written about a great deal since it premiered at Sundance back in January–neither film is examined too closely as a commentary on the way we live.
Livid at being spurned by Christine, because by now she’s fallen in love with Chad, Howard spills the beans to her about their “game.” But because his own vanity has been wounded, he can’t be pure about the gesture; fruitlessly hoping to gain her affection by exposing Chad’s contempt for her, he can only humiliate himself. By forcing us to consider the messiness of Howard’s behavior as closer to our own impulses, LaBute implicity raises the issue of our own complicity in the uglier aspects of capitalism that inform our own everyday emotional confusions. The sad fact is that Chad comes across as a self-perpetuating, impregnable myth, for better and for worse; Howard is a human being and a fumbler.
