The Office
IN GOOD COMPANY
FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX
Directed by John Moore
Sincerity is in short supply these days. You can see it displayed in Flight of the Phoenix and In Good Company, two under-the-radar movies that happen to star Dennis Quaid, and that dare to believe in their material, play it straight and treat their characters with something like decency.
In Good Company, the first solo outing from writer-director Paul Weitz (codirector of American Pie and About a Boy), is the slighter film because after four features, Weitz's framing is often merely serviceable, and his most distinctive quality, his gentleness, is also his Achilles' heel. Like his other movies, In Good Company is strongly influenced by The Graduate. From its deadpan revue-sketch dialogue scenes to its dreamy, emotionally transparent use of pop music, it proclaims Mike Nichols' classic as a primary influence on Weitz (not to mention Wes Anderson and Garden State's Zach Braff).
Quaid plays Dan Foreman, a 51-year-old ad sales executive at a Sports Illustrated-type magazine that just got acquired by Rupert Murdoch type Malcolm McDowell. The acquisition marks Dan and his colleagues as candidates for firing and throws his financial future in doubt, just when his fortysomething wife (wry, tough Marg Helgenberger) has gotten pregnant again and his eldest daughter (Scarlett Johansson, who is given little to do but be beautiful and mildly troubled) is about to transfer from a state school to NYU. Topher Grace plays Dan's nemesis/protégé Carter, a 26-year-old whiz kid from the parent company who takes Dan's title away and expropriates his corner office, but keeps him around instead of firing him.
Your middlebrow alarm bells might sound in the first scene, when Weitz scores Dan's obligatory waking-up-and-going-to-work montage with David Byrne's "Glass, Concrete and Stone" ("It's just a house, not a home"), oversimplifying Byrne's classic of late-20th-century alienation into a businessman's lament.ÊThe bells may keep ringing when one of Dan's clients (Philip Baker Hall) likens the two of them to dinosaurs, and Dan establishes his old-school-salesman-with-integrity credentials by replying, "Don't knock the dinosaurs. They ruled the earth for millions of years. They must have been doing something right."
Soon enough, Weitz settles into a less speechy, more universal story of youth and guile trumping wisdom and experience. Grace's alternately manipulative, honest and hapless Carter is a remarkable creation. Fidgeting and ruminating like a WASP Jeff Goldblum, he never delivers a line in quite the way you expect (demonstrating a cell phone for children, he coos in an affected kid's voice, "Mommy?I want one!"). Carter's boyish embrace of hard-ass business world clichés playfully tweaks a whole culture of phony office machismo; Grace's physicality shapes Weitz's kid-gloved satire into a fist. ("I'm your ninja assassin!" he tells his supervisor at the parent company, then kicks the air.)
In a subtler role, Quaid matches and ultimately checkmates his younger costar. The older this actor gets, the more moving he becomes, because he's a rare movie star who acknowledges the anxiety and doubt that comes with age. The root of Quaid's middle-aged charisma is his willingness to dramatize the sadness older men feel when they realize that their childhood dreams probably won't come true. This sadness-etched on Quaid's hangdog face and ropy shoulders, and focused in his resentful stare-also fueled Quaid's exceptional work in Far from Heaven and The Rookie.
Weitz is too much of a risk-averse commercial filmmaker to indict a whole culture for his corporate characters' myopia and sense of entitlement, and he saddles his tale with a happy ending that's just not credible. But parts of In Good Company are still moving because Weitz treats every office character with empathy. (When Dan takes responsibility for firing a man he hired eight years earlier, the man growls, "I would have stood in front of a bus for you, you piece of shit!") In Good Company is a rare American studio picture that dares to admit that Americans live in constant fear of losing money and social status; it unfashionably (and bravely) chooses to understand that anxiety rather than mock it. Weitz has the decency to put each firing in its proper emotional context. The fired person tries to leave without seeming too bitter or helpless; his surviving comrades express shock but no surprise, as well as an unseemly relief at having survived.
Flight of the Phoenix is another movie that takes its situations seriously and treats its characters like people rather than chess pieces. Like Robert Aldrich's brawny 1965 original, only more sociologically pointed and visually assured, the movie treats its desert-stranded plane-crash survivors as a microcosm of humankind. Quaid's character, Captain Town, is tougher and more cynical than Dan Foreman, and his working-class cynicism contrasts with Dan's office-friendly restraint. Town ultimately seems the deeper character because Moore's film treats him and his colleagues not merely as human beings (which is remarkable enough) but as emblems of conflicting attitudes toward citizenship.
Town is assigned to fly some recently fired oil drillers across the Gobi desert. After the crash (a marvel of precise framing and Peckinpah-style, time-suspending edits, despite some substandard CGI work), he finds himself at odds with a brilliant, freaky passenger, Elliott (Giovanni Ribisi), who claims to be an expert in airplane design and insists he can build a newer, lighter plane from the wreckage. "That's impossible," Town says. "At first it seems impossible that a bee should fly," Eliott replies, "But it does."
The tension between Town and Elliott animates the movie. It's the manager vs. the artist, the pragmatist vs. the visionary. When the two meet in the middle, it feels like a victory for rationality. Scott Frank and Edward Burns tie all of the group's decisions to the survival impulse, which must be counterbalanced with decency. (After a clash with smugglers, the group fights over whether to help a wounded smuggler or execute him to save water; it's a real conflict with moral implications, like the tiff over how to handle the German POW in Saving Private Ryan.)
Moore sells his pro-social messages by shooting big, clean, simple images-the cinematic equivalent of the terse poetry in fables and Bible verses, a style perfected by David O. Russell in Three Kings. Some of his images have an almost hallucinatory power-a dolly shot of the plane taking off that ends in a closeup of a padlocked airfield gate; a static master of two makeshift crosses flanked by two shovels; a hypothetical visualization of a passenger getting lost and dehydrated in the desert at night, beneath a planetarium-bright sky swarming with time-lapse stars. Moore also isn't afraid to encourage his cast to recreate the spare, diamond-hard characterizations common to 1960s action pictures like The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and The Professionals-movies that were all about honor, sacrifice and the camaraderie of sweat. As Town's cocky but reliable copilot, Tyrese Gibson's relaxed swagger reminded me of Steve McQueen. Ribisi's Eliott equals and in some ways improves upon Hardy Krüger's performance in the 1965 original. (Most people seem to hate Ribisi's work here, but I thought it was original, daring and big, in an Orson Welles/Peter Sellers way; his close-cropped blond hair and nerdy voice are artificial and off-putting, but they force you to concentrate on the content of Elliott's ideas rather than getting fixated on whether he's likable or trustworthy.)
I was not a fan of Moore's Bosnian action picture Behind Enemy Lines. I thought its decision to use the recent tragedy of the Balkan war as a backdrop for a slick, Top Gun-style story of a callow airman's moral rehabilitation was glib and shallow, and Moore's embrace of then-trendy filmmaking gimmicks (including apropos-of-nothing speed shifts) bespoke a lack of faith in his clearly formidable storytelling talent. But there were flashes of real artistry there, and Moore hones them in Phoenix, a controlled, mature work that uses grand, poetic effects sparingly, thereby increasing their power.
There are no huge dramatic surprises here, and Moore draws out some predictable scenes way past the point of usefulness. (The scene where Town has to be cajoled into endorsing Eliott's plan made me fondly recall a sendup of similar scenes in The Life Aquatic, when Ned Plimpton balks at joining the mission then finally says, "The answer's yes," and Zissou replies, "Well, it's got to be!" But these flaws are minor. It's hard to oversell Phoenix, an intelligent, moral, often beautiful action picture that pours new gas into an old vehicle, then takes wing.