"Hell it's business, not charity."
— CEO Jim Salinger
A 2010 drama film by John Wells, about a group of upper-class executives of various ages who are gradually laid off from their cushy, decades-long jobs at an enormous corporation and suddenly find themselves facing long-term unemployment, poverty and obsolescence.
The main characters are:
- Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck): A 37-year-old family man and well-paid, hotshot sales manager for GTX's shipbuilding division whose luxurious suburban life quickly becomes unaffordable after being laid off.
- Gene McClary (Tommy Lee Jones): The employee-conscious Executive Vice President of GTX and head of the division for which Bobby and Phil work at the beginning of the film.
- Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper): A lifelong GTX employee who worked his way up from grueling manual labor on the factory floor to a high-ranking, white-collar position over the course of decades, before facing downsizing and unemployment in his late fifties.
- Sally Wilcox (Maria Bello): The head of human resources for GTX with the unhappy job of firing many longterm employees. Having an affair with the older, unhappily-married Gene on the side.
- Jim Salinger (Craig T. Nelson): The billionaire CEO of GTX who built the company up with Gene's help since college and has become increasingly focused on appeasing short-term profit-hungry shareholders over the livelihoods of his many employees.
- Maggie Walker (Rosemarie DeWitt): Bobby's sympathetic wife and a nurse by trade, who emotionally and financially supports him and the family during their increasingly dire financial straits.
- Jack Dolan (Kevin Costner): Maggie's older brother, who owns a small carpentry and landscaping business and initially butts heads with Bobby over their mutual pride in their own careers and disdain for the other's.
Not to be confused with the 1997 black comedy In the Company of Men.
This film provides examples of:
- Age-Gap Romance: Gene's affair with Sally, who is around twenty years his junior going by the actors' ages.
- All for Nothing: The multiple rounds of layoffs were initiated by Salinger to boost the share price of GTX to discourage a hostile takeover bid from rival company Allied. In the end the company is taken over anyway, meaning all of the layoffs were for nothing. Gene is disgusted at the entire ordeal despite how wealthy the rising stock price has made him.
- And a Diet Coke: Subverted - Bobby's heavyset interviewer is having a salad and a Diet Coke for lunch, but Bobby is so frustrated with the unexpectedly long waiting-room sit, low salary offer and dismissal of his credentials that he rudely tells her she might as well skip the "Diet" Coke before storming out of the office.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Dysert: "You mind my asking - how old are you, Phil?"; the fiftysomething Woodward immediately learns his chances of landing the high-stress international exec job are null. Dysert next says he wouldn't consider anybody over thirty for the position.
- Awful Wedded Life: Heavily implied. Gene barely speaks to his wife and is keeping Sally on the side as a mistress. He eventaully moves in with Sally after being downsized.
- Bait-and-Switch: Bobby responds to an advertisement for a position as the Vice President of Marketing at a company, believing the work and the pay will at least be close to what he was accustomed to at GTX. On arriving, he's told that the job he's actually interviewing for is regional sales director, which requires relocation and pays just over half what he was making previously. Bobby storms out.
- Benevolent Boss: Gene McClary is the only boss any of the characters deal with directly and he's extremely affable and caring towards them. He was so protective of everyone who worked in his division that Salinger waited until he was out of town to initiate layoffs - after which he's furious.
- Big Fancy House: With varying levels of splendor depending on the characters' initial position - Bobby and Phil live in very spacious, modern suburban homes they are terrified of losing due to being unable to meet the mortgage payments. Meanwhile, their immediate superior Gene McClary has a full-blown lakefront mansion with a vast marble lobby and antique furniture pieces worth tens of thousands of dollars each, but has grown distasteful of this gaudy lifestyle as he sees the lives of his former employees crumble, and eventually openly suggests selling it all to help bankroll a new firm.
- Bittersweet Ending: Salinger caves to shareholder pressure and dissolves GTX anyway, walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options. Phil's suicide ultimately prompts Gene McClary to found a new consulting firm in one of the disused shipbuilding factories from his old division, bankrolled by his own buyout fortune and hiring on Bobby and hundreds of other former GTX employees who had lost their jobs.
- Boston: Like many an Affleck-starring film, it's set in Boston with a number of the characters sporting thick regional accents (notably Kevin Costner's working-class Jack, compared to the much more understated accent of Affleck's business-school grad Bobby) and the Walkers having a framed Bruins hockey jersey in their rec room.
- City People Eat Sushi: Bobby is so accustomed to eating out every day at his former job that he doesn't think to pack a meal on his first day as a carpenter, and glumly sits off to the side as the other men eat from their lunchboxes during breaktime.
- Maggie specifically suggests cutting way down on restaurant lunches as an easy way to save money early on in Bobby's unemployment cycle(ie. before things get serious enough to reach the point of selling their car, returning Christmas presents and listing the house).
- Crossing the Burnt Bridge: Jim Salinger to his former best friend Gene McClary during their awkward meeting in GTX's lobby after Gene himself has been unceremoniously downsized, and had one of his good friends commit suicide over their own firing by Salinger.
- Driven to Suicide: Phil Woodward. Moreso by his pride and personal demons than his actual financial circumstances - his wealthy friend and former boss Gene affably offers to help pay Phil's family's mortgage and tuition, but Phil refuses, and ultimately succumbs to his feelings of shame and uselessness, tragically taking his car for a spin with the garage door shut.
- A deleted scene found in the script also has Phil impulsively going into a pizza place to inquire after a "Help Wanted" sign for a delivery driver. The staff awkwardly inform him that they mostly just hire high school students, on part-time, and Phil leaves in disbelief that he's literally no longer "qualified" for a minimum wage job delivering pizzas. This happens earlier in the same evening as his suicide
- Drowning My Sorrows: Gene discovers Phil has been getting drunk in a bar most days a few weeks into the latter's unemployment, having gotten fed up with the seemingly ineffectual outplacement office and being told by his wife that he can't stay at the house all day or the neighbors will realize he was downsized.
- Happiness in Minimum Wage: Bobby considers this after working as a carpenter under Jack for a few weeks - the straightforward manual labor and job security of house restoration is in many ways preferable to the hectic rat race of his former corporate life, even if the pay is nowhere near comparable.
- Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: Seasoned businessman and M.B.A. Bobby Walker taking a job as an apprentice carpenter for Jack. He's so sore by the end of the first day he can barely move.
- Subverted in a deleted scene where Phil attempts to get one of the classic examples of this as a pizza delivery man and is even rejected from that.
- Fanservice: Maria Bello gets a scene walking around in lingerie including a brief topless shot from the front.
- Firing Day: One that kicks off the entire movie. Then it happens a second time halfway through.
- Good Old Ways: Gene McClary ascribes to this, valuing loyalty and taking care of one's workers in an era increasingly defined by prioritizing shareholders and profit at the expense of employees. His philosophy loses out to Salinger, who represents the latter attitude, so he decides to put people to work by forming his own company instead.
- How the Mighty Have Fallen: Basically the whole premise of the film - successful execs with six-figure salaries and luxurious lives suddenly facing bankruptcy mere months after losing their jobs, when their enormous cost of living expenses (giant, long-term mortgages on their Big Fancy Houses, membership fees at golf and country clubs, detailing for their sports cars, private school and university tuition for their children, etc) rapidly deplete their savings as they find themselves unable to find comparable new careers during the recession.
- A subversion with VP McClary - his salary and stock options were so high that he doesn't fear poverty even after he himself is laid off, but he glumly misses the partnership and influence he once had with with lifelong best friend and CEO Jim Salinger, and laments the fact that the company he helped build now exists just to maximize profits for faceless shareholders instead of providing job security and fulfillment for its many loyal employees.
- Inhuman Resources: Bobby's twelve years at GTX entitle him to only three months' of severance pay. YMMV on whether this is as "generous" as the HR guy claims - Bobby's engineer friend at the outplacement center got nine months' worth, while his blue-collar carpentry coworker's father got nothing.
- Internal Reformist: Sally admits at the end that she saw herself as this, wanting to at least minimize the damage the layoffs were going to do. It's all for nought, as she implies in her final scene that she's also going to be on the chopping block.Wilcox: I sat in rooms and talked about how to destroy peoples' lives. I thought I could do more from the inside...save a few jobs here and there. If I didn't do it somebody else would.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
- Maggie's brother Jack. He bears a deadpan snarky attitude towards Bobby's former lofty career and salary, and takes glee in watching him struggle with the grueling manual labor of Jack's own job, but is revealed to deliberately operate his business at a slight loss during the winter just to keep his workers employed - something GTX's billionaire CEO Salinger scoffed at doing earlier in the film despite having more money than he could spend in a lifetime. Indeed, Salinger wasn't even balking at operating at a loss, but at operating at anything less than the maximum possible amount of profit, even though it meant laying off hundreds.
- Bobby himself. He gets prone to lashing out at innocent bystanders and neglecting his family as the stress of unemployment and losing money mount but he is a good person underneath it all.
- JerkAss: While not an outright example, Salinger is a calloused business executive willing to ruin hundreds of peoples' lives without any apparent remorse, and he doesn't even bother attending Phil's funeral after the latter's suicide. After GTX is bought by Allied anyway he doesn't even seem that upset, only boasting about how his shares are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Deconstructed. Salinger is correct when he points out that none of the employees were ever guaranteed lifetime employment, they were paid very well during their employment, their jobs no longer needed to be done, and they were given severance packages they were not legally entitled to. Gene argues that they wouldn't have had to ruin so many jobs were it not for a shareholder war between GTX and Allied, which is vindicated somewhat when Allied buys GTX anyway — especially considering he originally noted that GTX would have lost more jobs in acquisition than a layoff despite the acquisition happening eventually.
- Married to the Job: Essentially all the main characters who work for GTX. Bobby's wife Maggie points out that even with the all the stress and sadness of going bankrupt since Bobby was downsized, she's loved him actually being around the house and family more often.
- Mean Boss: CEO Jim Salinger is cold enough to lay off hundreds off his subordinates, but we never see him meeting with or criticizing any of them directly, except for Gene who's been his best friend and business partner since college and whom he still attempts to make peace with even during the strain of layoffs which eventually include Gene himself.
- Nervous Wreck: Phil Woodward throughout the film - first merely due the fear that he'll lose his job, then while watching the bills pile up and his life spiral downwards after actually being laid off. Most of his interactions from that point on involve uncomfortably and indignantly dealing with the fact that he's too old to compete with the rising generation of young new M.B.A.s or the business etiquette of the modern world.
- No Antagonist: Salinger is the closest thing to a villain in the film, but he is just doing his job, and he isn't malicious about it, he even gives the employees better severance packages than they are entitled to. Their biggest problems aren't caused directly by unemployment, but how much their self-image is wrapped up in their jobs.
- Nosy Neighbor: Subverted in that it's unclear to the audience if the Woodwards actually have nosy neighbors, but Phil's wife still insists he leave the house from 9 - 6 each day, with briefcase in hand, so the neighbors won't suspect he's unemployed.
- Office Romance: Gene McClary and Sally Wilcox.
- Oh, Crap!: Bobby learning that the extremely promising job interview, for which he spent a significant chunk of his dwindling savings to fly to Chicago and attend, was accidentally scheduled for the following week, and that the boss won't even be back in the state for days. As Bobby can neither afford to stay in a motel until then, miss a week's wages as a carpenter or fly back for the next Friday, the opportunity is presumably lost.
- Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: The laid off employees were very well paid for many years but they spent too much and saved too little, resulting in avoidable hardships. They also didn't adapt to their new circumstances, choosing instead to maintain their images.
- Rock Bottom: Bobby finding out that his son returned the Xbox 360 he got for Christmas because he understands that the family can't afford it anymore. While a minor thing in comparison to the other losses the family has sustained, it serves as the final humiliation that Bobby suffers before approaching his brother-in-law about a job in construction, which he had previously scoffed at.
- The Scapegoat: Being in charge of human resources, Sally is the unfortunate face of the layoffs at GTX while Salinger and the other senior executives largely avoid scrutiny by the characters. Bobby leaves profanity-laced voicemails for her as a way to cope and Gene's former secretary gives her a Death Glare at the end of the movie when she visits his new firm.
- Skewed Priorities: Bobby maintains his expensive country club membership and details his Porsche even after being fired so he can "look successful." Maggie rightly calls him out on how such luxuries should be the first thing to go when you've been fired.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: It initially seems like Phil will survive the second round of GTX layoffs due to Gene blocking any attempts to fire him. Except that even though he was the first GTX employee and has a significant stake in the company, as an Executive Vice President Gene is just another employee who can be let go from a publicly traded company at any time. Which is exactly what happens, and without his protection Phil is laid off as well.
- Villainy-Free Villain: Salinger has no qualms about firing people to increase the company's stock value. Of course, that's his job — and he's never actively cruel about it other than not attending Phil's funeral.
- Women Are Wiser: Maggie manages the family finances, tries to rein in spending, makes practical suggestions to adjust to Bobby being downsized and encourages Bobby to realize the reality of their new situation when he still seems to be in shock over having been fired.
- Workaholic: Most of the characters, hence the title.
- Working-Class Hero: Played straight with Jack Dolan, who's got a relatively prosperous life as an uneducated carpenter and takes care of the men who work for him, compared to the cutthroat world of corporate finance. Jack presses the issue by pointing out that he read the average CEO now makes about 700 times what his low-level employees make, and sarcastically asks Bobby if he thinks Jim Salinger works 700 times as hard as the manual laborers building his ships. Bobby is later humbled to learn just how hard blue collar work can be, compared to his luxurious former job which paid vastly more.
