In Good Company (DVD)

If you ever had a keen desire for a movie that feels enormously real then your wish has come true as Paul Weitz's In Good Company manages to absolutely embrace reality and put it on screen with a core group of actors that deliver on every level.

Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid) has a wonderful family and a successful career as head of ad sales at the popular sporting magazine Sporting America, but Foreman's corporate and family life are about to go through a whirlwind of changes as he learns his wife (Marg Helgenberger) is pregnant with their third child and Carter Duryea (Topher Grace), a 26-year-old whiz kid has just acquired his job through a corporate buy out. So, the stage is set as a 51-year-old adult and a 26-year-old, single-minded, kid must work together in more ways than originally come to surface.

Paul Weitz, the writer and director, of In Good Company has crafted a story that feels as real as life itself. Personally, coming from a background in sales, the dialogue and corporate environment ring eternally true and along with that aspect, every dramatic moment is kept under control so as not to deviate from Weitz's goal of telling a "real" story. This works in several ways, but then again it has its downsides.

As you will learn from not only watching the film, but also the special features, realism was Weitz's goal all along and while that is all fine and dandy, the one place where the film suffers is it doesn't have that dramatic climax that movies are meant to give us. This film exudes realism, where meaningful moments mean something but they aren't put on a pedestal as they normally are in films, therefore they aren't as emotionally powerful, detracting from your resulting emotion at the end of the film. Instead of happy or sad, you are left with a ho-hum feeling, which, with a bit of touch-up on the writing could have been dramatically changed. Nevertheless, the film still works and is a joy to watch.

As for the special features you get several deleted scenes with optional commentary by Weitz, a look at the making of the movie via seven featurettes, a look at the "New York Locations" as well as a commentary track with Topher Grace and Paul Weitz.

The featurettes are good as they keep themselves short and to the point, focusing on the making of the film, but the audio commentary is certainly the stand-out feature here as Grace and Weitz have certainly built a good relationship making for a lively and entertaining, as well as informative, commentary.

The one other feature that really tells the story behind In Good Company is the deleted scenes, which as you are watching them all should have been deleted, but that is just the beginning. Weitz goes into the enormous amount of influence his recently deceased father had on the film and despite his emotional attachment to several of the scenes, he did a wonderful job knowing exactly what should and should not have made it into the final cut of this film. Several of the deleted scenes are either unnecessary character building scenes or comical scenes, scenes in which if left in would have either slowed the movie down or detracted from the realism of the feature, turning it into a goofy satire.

All things considered, I do believe this is a very good movie, and if it somehow had managed to incorporate some sort of powerful, dramatic payoff it certainly would have been one of the movies talked about during the 2005 Oscar race, instead we simply get to sit back and enjoy it on DVD several times over.