For much of “The Good Boss” — a competent workplace drama that is described in its press material, perhaps a little too hopefully, as a comedy — a businessman named Blanco (Javier Bardem) worries about the decorative scale installed at the entrance to his factory.
Something’s off-kilter.
Blanco’s firm, you see, specializes in industrial measuring devices: the kind used to weigh cattle, for instance. If this vintage scale, a symbol of his business, is uneven, what does that say about the way he runs the place? On the other hand, doesn’t a little imbalance make the world go round?
That gets to the heart of the problem with this managerial melodrama from Spanish writer-director Fernando León de Aranoa. For the most part, it runs like a well-calibrated machine. But despite a plot full of backstabbing and infidelities, the movie is just that: a machine.
Thanks to a finely tuned and reliable product, the silver-haired Blanco has earned a wall full of industry awards. But for a number of reasons, his equilibrium is in danger — and just when a committee is coming to consider him for one more award.
How much can go wrong with a scale? Well, recent layoffs have driven one disgruntled employee (Óscar de la Fuente) to camp out on public land in front of the factory in protest. On top of that, Blanco’s longtime head of production (Manolo Solo) is distracted by his wife’s infidelity with another factory employee. He’s missing deadlines as a result.
Even the one bright spot in this increasingly asymmetrical environment may be a warning sign: Blanco himself has become fixated on a pretty intern (Almudena Amor). Think about it: She’s taller than average, sticking out like, well, a sore thumb. And that attractive appendage is about to throw Blanco’s scale out of whack.
All this has the potential for juicy corporate intrigue. But like a penny-pinching supervisor, “The Good Boss” is stingy with its resources. In Bardem’s Blanco, you can still see a touch of the Bond villain beneath the CEO, even as the actor works hard to give his character some gravitas. He convincingly projects an entrepreneur’s weariness and practicality, as well as his thirst for power. He’s like a mid-level godfather, with a superficial benevolence that may hide something more sinister.
But the central metaphor of scales and justice is pretty heavy-handed. And while it’s a thrill to see Bardem — who maintains a slow burn for most of the film’s two hours — finally explode in the final act, it’s too little, too late.
As far as movies about corporate wheeling and dealing go, “The Good Boss” is, in some ways, better than the epic mess that is “House of Gucci.” Yet one misses the very things that threw that sprawling soap opera out of balance. One longs for the bravura spark of a Lady Gaga as the charismatic killer — or even Jared Leto’s Latka Gravas-like hamfest — anything to inject some energy into this oddly inert drama.
It doesn’t help that, for the film’s climax, León de Aranoa falls back on a variation of a “Godfather” editing gimmick. (In that 1972 classic, Francis Ford Coppola intercut between a baptism and brutal mob hits.) Without spoiling anything here, the juxtaposed events aren’t nearly so operatic. And that’s despite some operatic references: The name of a factory engineer played by Celso Bugallo — a minor character who fulfills a major role in Blanco’s fate — is Fortuna (meaning fate), evoking the “O Fortuna” choral passage in the opera “Carmina Burana.”
Despite some quality craftsmanship, “The Good Boss” ultimately doesn’t pay off. Capitalism should be more fun than this.
Unrated. At Landmark’s E Street and Bethesda Row cinemas. Contains nudity, sexual situations and violence. In Spanish and Arabic with subtitles. 120 minutes.
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