It’s a telling line that serves as the tagline for The Company Men: “In America, we give our lives to our jobs. Now it’s time to take them back.” It’s a line that tells us a lot about ourselves and our society, and as for The Company Men the movie, it will do likewise. The folks out at Anchor Bay sent out a copy of this one for us to review, and it’s not a hundred percent realistic, it’ll still be worth your time to get hands on a copy of this.

The Company Men follows Bobby Walker, a man who’s just recently been fired following a corporate acquisition which left him “redundant”. And while Bobby’s recovery is a long and difficult process, in the midst of economic holocaust, he discovers that he’s not alone, and in the process of attempting to recover, he begins to discover just what’s truly important in life. And the big secret? It’s not really his job.

It’s getting downright unnerving how many movies are about recession and foreclosure and suchlike these days. I mean, come on; we just got through with the vaguely unnerving horror that was Homeless For The Holidays, which was really just a low-budget and much more pronounced version of The Company Men, and now here we are getting smacked in the face with it again, and not even Tommy Lee Jones’ brand of acerbic good humor and upright dignity can soften the blow.

Still though, the end result is still pretty good. Granted, some of what we’ll be seeing won’t be believable (Bobby Walker turning down a $65,000 a year job because it’d require relocation, or refusing to sell a house to get $850,000 for it fair market are just two examples, let alone the “give back the Xbox” concept–you pay for it once, and then it’s done, unless you’re talking about Xbox Live but you don’t need it to play), but once you get past the sheer preposterousness of some of the numbers, well, what you get is a surprisingly realistic portrayal (with about twenty percent fantasy layered on top when you hear some of these numbers) of people who are in the midst of some of the worst circumstances of their lives, and taking it with varying degrees of success. It’s not a morality play. It’s not some kind of Horatio Alger fairy tale where working hard and getting ahead are inextricably and inexplicably linked. This is the real story.

And the Screenhead Ten Scale loves a real story when it sees it, and gives The Company Men an eight out of ten. Eight for the eighty percent reality, minus two for the twenty percent that’s not.