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Affleck and Costner are in good 'Company'

ECONOMISTS SAY Americans are "de-leveraging," an academic way of saying that the Great Recession has bulldozed millions of lives.

ECONOMISTS SAY Americans are "de-leveraging," an academic way of saying that the Great Recession has bulldozed millions of lives.

We get an up-close and personal look at the process in the well-made "The Company Men," a movie that follows a quartet of corporate lifers as downsizing takes their jobs, their savings, their stuff and, finally, a little bit of their souls.

The movie opens as the camera prowls their posh suburban homes, and we see the material expression of the good times - the big-screen TVs, game consoles, the Porsche two-seater in the two-car garage.

But it's all resting on the thin, invisible skin of a bubble, and one that's about to pop. At HQ, the chairman (Craig T. Nelson) of an industrial conglomerate desperate to prop up his stock price is pushing through another round of layoffs.

Writer-director John Wells (who spent much time talking with laid-off workers) does a nice job creating the atmosphere of paranoia and disorientation in the executive suite as it dawns on everyone that the corporate hatchet lady (a wonderfully unsentimental Maria Bello) isn't just cutting fat - this cut goes to the bone.

Hotshot salesman Bobby (Ben Affleck) gets his pink slip, and spits his feelings of betrayal in the face of his mentor, the corporate No. 2 (Tommy Lee Jones).

Another good moment - an old-timer (Chris Cooper) offers Bobby condolences, but we see he's really pumping his "friend" for information, and so does Bobby.

No atheists in foxholes, no blood brothers in boardrooms.

"Company Men" charts the deteriorating bonhomie at corporate, but devotes much of its time charting Bobby's humiliating regression. It's like the Kubler-Ross stages of downsizing - denial, anger, outplacement, eBay, moving back with your parents and getting a job with your brother-in-law, who's a contractor.

And who's also Kevin Costner. What a cast Wells has assembled for this "little" picture. Costner, doing his best work in years; Jones, the up-from-the-shipyards vet whose lined face is a map of compromised ethics; Cooper as the old dog reassigned, hopelessly, to the new-tricks department.

Wells has given them a tasty script - sharp, funny, touching - and his troupe of pros makes the most of it. I wonder, though, if anyone will watch them.

"The Company Men" is way under the radar. Thanks in part to a release date that straddles 2010-11, it popped up on few top 10 lists and earned a little praise for the fine work of its ensemble cast.

It's also gotten some pushback for its focus on white-collar swells; given all that's happened in the last four years, it's hard to get too worked up at the sight of a guy getting misty-eyed when the repo man comes for his Boxster.

Take away the privilege (and believe me, the story takes it away), though, and you have a socially portable and sadly familiar scenario, one that will resonate across economic lines.

Anyone can relate to ideas at work in "The Company Men." When you take a person's job, you take more than an income, you take his identity, his self-respect.

And one more thing - his ability to be productive citizens. Wells takes a sideways look here at the big subject of the underemployed. We have a country full of qualified people desperate to work, but who can't find a place in the new tattoo parlor, tanning salon, meth lab, croupier economy our postindustrial elites have created for us.

I applaud the note of hope that Wells chooses for his epilogue, a nod to our entrepreneurial spirit, our desire to build and rebuild. I wish his principals luck getting a loan from one of our TBTF bankers, who are off betting on commodities.