Here's a trailer for The Company Men, John "ER" Wells' drama feature about the working men of the rat race and what happens when they get laid off. Very timely! The teaser was intriguing. How does the full-length trailer look?

Though critics loved it at Sundance (how is a movie starring Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Maria Bello, Chris Cooper, and Kevin Costner that's written and directed by the producer of one of the most successful TV dramas in history Sundance fare these days?), this trailer is just so corny. First off, we really need to can it with the Boston fetishizing. The accents, the hardscrabble-but-warm toughness, the carefully lived-in blue collaredness. It's all getting to be (already is?) so cloying. So that's annoying.

Also annoying? It appears that the only woman in the corporate world (Maria Bello) is a castrating bitch. All the other women are just wives. I know, I know that might still be a fairly realistic depiction of some workplaces today (numbers wise, not castrating bitch wise), but still. Plus, while we're always glad to see Kevin Costner getting tossed a bone, this grizzled shtick he's taken to is somewhat upsetting. Sure he's always been kind of grizzled (Bull Durham, Tin Cup, The Postman, just about everything else he's made, except No Way Out, Thirteen Days, and The Untouchables), but now it seems like less of a performance and more of a "Oh, Kevin just rolled in from his house, don't bother putting him in costume, he's good the way he is" kind of thing. Sort of sad.

The movie is timely though! Let's hope it actually pays respect to those (white collar white people) going through very real, very difficult employment struggles right now, rather than using them for cheap stabs at the heartstrings.

Oh, also! Touting actors as being "Academy Award winner[s]" when they won Academy Awards for non-acting (Affleck: writing, Costner: directing) is a tad disingenuous is it not?

[via The Playlist]