The company men - 2010

I liked it enough but it’s not the kind of movie I’d watch every day. It was well done, the story was modern and about ‘real life’, and with an optimistic ending. At first the main character really annoyed me, what with him and me being so totally opposite in every aspect of life, I mean:  he has a very good job where he makes really good money, and yet the moment he loses his job instantly things start falling down; he refuses the idea that he should start saving money, for example giving up his golf club, and considers living like normal people like failing in life. He has to sell his big house and change his way of life, and I thought: he made so much money and he has no savings at all?? 
Anyway, Bobby (Ben Affleck) is the main character, but we also follow two other men who lost their job: Phil (Chris Cooper) a senior in the firm who gets fired after thirty years of working there, and Gene (Tommy Lee Jones), unhappy with the firm’s policy who is fired himself when he complaints about it. 
It’s harder on Phil who doesn’t even find comfort at home, where his wife forces him to stay out all day to pretend that he still has a job so that her neighbours won’t find out about it; he can’t find another job because he gets told that he’s too old; it’s so hard on him that he eventually kills himself. I wonder if she’s happier now.
Bobby goes to work for his brother-in-law Jack (Kevin Costner), while also looking for another job like the one he lost. Working as a builder doesn’t suit him and he’s rather bad at it, but Jack keeps him because he knows that Bobby needs a job, the same way as the other workers he has with him. Bobby will learn from them that Jack won’t make good money after finishing the work because he’ll barely make it even. He lowered the price and kept them working so to give them all a job.
Gene feels very bad about the firm’s policy, feeling that it’s unfair and unnecessary - which of course is true as it always is true, because those higher up in position of command won’t give up a single dollar of their earnings, going on making lots and lots of money and firing people to keep the firm afloat. It’s like politics, when they say that there are no money so some people are left with no job and no pension while the politicians get tens of thousands every month, and they say it’s necessary :-/
Gene was fired by his best friend, the company’s CEO who build the firm with him, and by his mistress (Maria Bello), whose job seems to be the unpleasant one of firing people. He’s not in the same situation as the others though, because he still has shares in the firm that grant him an income, but he wants to do something, build something and create jobs. 
At the end he decides to start a new business, and he hires those people who lost their job. The movie ends with Bobby making a boring speech to those people where they start their new job.
It’s a bit annoying and depressing at times, but there are nice moments. Bobby is a young man with a wife and two kids, and I liked the scene where he apologized to her for failing her, and she looks at him like “what are you talking about?” actually enjoying having him at home for a change, and she never stops smiling at him. Of course at first she was troubled, because he was wasting his money on the golf club and such things as if nothing had changed, but she never hated their life together and the fact that it wasn’t as luxurious as it was before. 
The Jack character was so good as to feel rather unreal, the boss working extra time only to make it even because he want make much money out of it, only because he cared to give his men a job.. I’m afraid there aren’t many characters like this in the real world.