It was pleasant to come across this review and since the movie was also a flop, I thougt of brining more awareness to it by sharing on Dlike. I still haven't watched the movie yet.
Somehow, an all-star Hollywood cast created The Company Men (2010) and it got past the usual censors. The movie is an effective rebuttal to Arthur Miller's 1949 Death of a Salesman. The recently-laid-off characters spend the movie living their lives after rounds of layoffs.
Fascinatingly, the movie boiled down to a Marxist v. Free-Market debate, and fell on the side of the free markets. This was a detail that the star-studded Hollywood cast likely neglected to recognize (starring Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Costner, Chris Cooper, Craig T. Nelson, and being a Weinstein Production). It would take someone versed in the labor theory of value and subjective value theory to recognize the praise for the marketplace and the individual that are implicit in the film's plot.
To the usual Hollywood censors, the movie would appear like nothing more than how callous corporate downsizing damages lives and how hard it is to rebuild.
A Marxist v. Free-Market debate is had through the course of this movie, with the free-market Austrians prevailing, and the most angry Marxist in the film driving himself to an early death. That the angriest Marxist sports a McCain bumper sticker and certainly sees himself as a Republican makes his self-destruction at the hands of his firmly held belief in the Marxist labor theory of value all the more interesting to watch, though it is not clear what the filmmaker is intending by the subtle placement of the bumper sticker.
The film The Company Men, as a response to the 1940's anti-capitalism of Death of a Salesman, and as a response to popular out of touch jeremiads of our age, is excellent. As a survey of these false ideas, it is a film that can easily encourage ancillary discussions to follow from its watching, making it an accessible, easy to watch foundation for classroom discussion, or family and friend discussion on Menger, Marx, and the free market.
