Movie Night

I know why I didn’t get much done last night- I forgot to bring my super productive list home with me.  Plus I was in a poopy mood, so instead of being productive I watched The Company Men, a not terrible movie with Ben Affleck and lots of grizzly actors.  It was about the cause and effect of corporate downsizing, and pretty good despite a little bit of cliché.  It was acceptable cliché, feel-good cliché, except for the one depressing cliché.  One thing that made me insane was that Kevin Costner is pictured on the cover as if he is one of the suits, but he actually owns a construction business in the movie, and is a far more interesting character than any of the suits.  Continuity is more important, I guess.  It was a heart-warming movie about corporate downsizing, which is crazy, and the things that happen in this movie are not at all realistic, but movies are supposed to be an escape.  There’s enough depressing shit in real life, thank you.  I really loved the role of the wife who is always supportive and says the right things and never gets upset or stressed out that they have to sell their fancy house and her husband has to go work a construction job.  She is this perfect, thin, beautiful woman who remained tiny some ten years after giving birth to two children, does the grocery shopping with reusable bags in her Volvo, is the family accountant and counselor, and makes small, unchallenging suggestions to her husband that they will need to sell their house and his Porsche and when he hands her his last check of severance pay, she says, “What is this?” as if she doesn’t already know.  She suggests that they move in with his parents and never seems stressed or angry and when he apologizes for failing her, she tells him that not only has he never let her down, this situation has allowed them to spend so much more time together!  The two other wives showcased in this film are the money-obsessed harpy who gets cheated on and left for a woman at least 30 years too young for Tommy Lee Jones, and the heartless bitch who makes her husband leave every day and act like he’s going to work because she doesn’t want the neighbors to know that he lost his job.  That guy commits suicide.  It’s a charming movie, and clearly written by a male.  But I’m not done chewing on this perfect wife bullshit.  When he finds out that she stopped paying the club fees and gets kicked off the golf course, he goes to her job and rages at her, ignoring all her attempts to reason with him.  When she comes home from work, she apologizes and says she should have told him when she stopped paying the fees.  SURE.  Even though it doesn’t sound like it, I did like most of the movie, especially when Mr. Big Shot has to go work construction for a while for Mrs. Perfect Wife’s brother, who turns out to be a pretty awesome human being.

Ugh, do I want realism after all?  Maybe just something a little less chauvinistic, or some women characters that are not stereotypes of what men think women are or what they should be.  The other two wives were clearly written to be bitchy and out of touch, but this perfect wife seems way more like a fantasy that something based in reality.  I should write an essay on this movie.