In Good Company - DVD Review

Paul Weitz' script for In Good Company is the kind of work that looks so effortless that you'd be forgiven for thinking that it's easy. In discussing the film, recently released on DVD, with friends many have commented on how the film feels so light and airy, bordering on inconsequential. And I always respond with something like "and that's not that easy to do." Yes, Weitz' tale of mid-20s vs. mid-life crises doesn't have your traditional "big" laughs or romantic moments that we've come to expect from a romantic comedy (which doesn't quite seem like the right genre for this film but the one that the marketing incorrectly stuffed it into), but that's what makes its charms all the more appealing to me. Without the traditional setup-joke structure of the typical American comedy, In Good Company is interesting and enjoyable from beginning to end, not just in fits and spurts. It's not riotous, fall-out-of-your-seat funny or even romantic enough to pull your heartstrings, it's something far more difficult and rewarding, realistic.

After his equally brilliant script for About a Boy, Paul Weitz may have cornered the market on white collar male angst. Both films feature men asking themselves what's important in life. A fancy car? A job title? Love? Parenthood? Weitz comments on his thoroughly enjoyable and always interesting audio commentary for In Good Company that he tried to make a film that was accessible through a number of different characters. You could see the story through the eyes of Dennis Quaid's character, a man in his 50s forced into a demotion and dealing with the changing dynamics of his roles as father and husband at the same time. Or, and this one would be more of a stretch because I believe her character's underwritten, you could experience it through the eyes of Scarlet Johannson's character. But, largely because I'm in a similar life position, for me, the story belongs to Carter (Grace), the man who thinks he has it all in place, and watches his perspective change. And it's a fascinating, interesting, easily identifiable tale.

Regardless of your choice of protagonist, the main reason In Good Company is one of the best recent scripts, is its utmost devotion to character. Yes, things come together a little too neatly in the end, and I wish they didn't, but even then they don't wrap up as much as they would in a more traditional romantic comedy because for Weitz, that's not important. The characters believability and their emotional journeys through the film are the keys to Weitz, not your standard big jokes.

If Weitz has a flaw at this point in his career, it's that he writes for men much better than he writes for women. In both About a Boy and now In Good Company, the men are far more interesting than the women. Yes, they're both stories essentially about male experiences but In Good Company would have been even stronger if it had a character as well-rounded as Grace's and Quaid's in the hands of an actress as capable as Scarlett. For the most part, Scarlett's character is just a plot device for the men in the film, one who sees her as a girl and the other as a woman. It's a great writing device but could have been even stronger if Weitz wrote a little more detail into her character.

If you don't believe me, and you think that the light, popcorn feel of In Good Company is something anyone could do, listen to the great commentary on the new DVD. Weitz goes into fantastic detail about what he was trying to do with numerous parts of the film from his motifs (paralleling Carter's broken headlight with a black eye later in the film) to the visual cues he wrote in to give the story the feel of a fable. It's a commentary that would be interesting to any writer, especially those of us who hope to make scripts that we know are hard to pull off look so damn easy.