OxfordPress.com

Grade: C+

Verdict: Starring Douglas McGrath and Sigourney Weaver. Directed by McGrath and Peter Askin. Rated PG-13 for sexual humor and drug references. One hour, 21 minutes.

Details: Not the best company.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: t's tempting to call “Company Man” one of those movies where the actors are having more fun than the audience. Though it's questionable whether the actors are having fun.

In this sporadically amusing Cold War comedy, Douglas McGrath plays Allen Quimp, a grammar-obsessed, henpecked English teacher in suburban Connecticut, circa 1961. His Junior League-ish wife, Daisy (the ever fine Sigourney Weaver), is a spritely, daffily self-centered harridan who keeps nagging him to get a better job.

To get her off his back, Quimp tells her his teaching job is a cover for his real occupation: top-secret CIA operative. Through a series of events — most specifically, a defecting Russian ballet star (Ryan Phillippe) — the agency is forced to hire Quimp for real. As damage control, they dump him in a quiet little backwater where nothing ever happens.

A quiet little backwater named Cuba.

And that's how the United States got involved in the Bay of Pigs. Well, it's not quite that simple. Daisy comes along to write a best seller about her newly dashing husband and ends up hiding deposed dictator Batista (Alan Cumming) in their house. Meanwhile Quimp gets caught up in a CIA plot to assassinate Castro (Anthony LaPaglia ) by any means necessary (poisoned cigars, LSD-laced water).

The strong cast also includes Denis Leary and John Turturro as fellow agents and an unbilled Woody Allen as the Francophile bureau chief. None manage to do much with the surprisingly weak material (McGrath directed and adapted “Emma” and co-wrote “Bullets Over Broadway”). Leary has one funny scene in which McGrath uses the difference between who and whom as a kind of nerd's water torture (it's a bit like an Abbott and Costello routine), while Allen's major comic contribution is to wear a beret. Turturro takes to making the sort of ham-actor entrances you associate with a floundering stage farce.

McGrath, who also co-directed and co-wrote the screenplay (with his partner Peter Askin), is clearly the film's center. He has an effective, light comic quality but seems obsessed with “Get Smart.” He plays Quimp as a cross between Don Adams and a young Bob Newhart.

But McGrath can't decide if he wants the movie to be a satire or a broad farce. If it's intended as satire, he's too careless with his references (Weaver says the only Spanish she knows is “Viva Las Vegas,” which was made in 1964). If it's intended as broad farce, the energy is forced and frenetic.

That's not to say the movie is a stinker. It's not. It's often funny. Just not funny often enough. The best hope you can have for “Company Man” is that some Hollywood power will see it and decide to reunite the actors in a better movie.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, (none)