"It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence."
~ Sigmund Freud who was born in a town on the banks of Moravia, aka Cold War, River ( The Future of Illusion)
Palace is peppered with colourful characters like J and F …
Javier Bardem (No Country For Old Men, Skyfall) is the charmingly evil boss in this Spanish dramedy about a family-run factory plagued by economic woes.
Blanco (Bardem), the charismatic owner of a family-run factory, is under pressure as he covets a local award for business excellence. Everything needs to be perfect! But the veneer of the perfect company cracks as Blanco must deal with a vengeful fired worker, a depressed supervisor, and an infatuated ambitious intern. The Good Bosswon six Goya awards from the Spanish Film Academy earlier this year and is a piercingly clever comedy, featuring Academy Award winner Javier Bardem at the top of his game.
“Good Boss”, forces us to review our opinion of this good boss. The experience may be discomforting, but that paradox delivers a rewarding benefit, sending us away realising that what we have seen is not what we at first were thinking that de Aranoa was giving us – a not simple but nicely complicated tangle to ponder and unravel.
‘It’s hard to watch yourself’: Javier Bardem on becoming that boss
There are two truisms about comedy. First, that it is much harder to deliver than drama. Second, that it doesn’t travel well. That second rule certainly doesn’t apply to the dark Spanish romp The Good Boss, which naturally owes a good deal to Javier Bardem’s ebullient performance as Julio Blanco, the overbearing, grasping yet oddly appealing owner of a venerable Spanish factory beset with PR and employment issues.
It isn’t all Bardem’s doing, however. Wherever you live, you know exactly what’s going on here. We all get what it means to be exploited, abused or sidelined at work. That’s an international phenomenon. Even in translation, the title smirks with irony; you know immediately that the good boss is going to be anything but.
The Good Boss is written and directed by Fernando Leon de Aranoa, whose excellent drama about unemployed shipyard workers, Mondays in the Sun, won the Golden Shell in San Sebastian in 2002. Bardem starred in that film too – he and Leon de Aranoa are close friends – as the natural leader of these dumped workers. Nineteen years later, they are back in San Sebastian with a bookend piece, albeit one that reflects the changed times.
“Both stories deal with working life,” Leon de Aranoa told Hollywood Reporter in an interview at the festival. “The first one was about unemployment; The Good Boss works like a sinister counter-shot, showing what work can be like. But the difference in The Good Boss, beside the sense of humour, is that the workers do not share a sense of class identity. They don’t have the strength of a collective fight.”
The great joke of The Good Boss, played out in one escalating comic scene after another, is that the slightly ludicrous Julio Blanco – Bardem is not only aged up, but wears a terrible wig – really believes in himself as the company’s paterfamilias. He inherited the company, a manufacturer of industrial scales, from his father. He also inherited some of the workers; his childhood friend Miralles, son of his father’s manager, is now manager in his turn. When Miralles starts making mistakes because his marriage is imploding, Blanco takes it upon himself to visit his wife and try to browbeat her into coming home.
I wanted to tell a story of how personal relationships interact with the professional and how the borderline is not very clear,” says Leon de Aranoa. “How our work defines us and goes too far into our personal life.” But he is also giving us an object lesson in raw capitalism. Miralles’ wife refuses to comply with the boss’ wishes. Miralles, a loyal offsider for 50 years, is therefore sacked. Job done.
Using humour, Leon de Aranoa says, was a way into discussing “not only the dynamics of the relationship between the boss and his workers but also their relationships with each other”. Another sacked worker is camped outside the gates of the factory with banners and a megaphone, berating the patron and using the decorative scales at the factory gate as a makeshift potty; Blanco will have to call in favours to tidy up that situation. As he raises a glass at Friday evening drinks to the next round of retrenchments, he smiles at each casualty with avuncular indulgence. “Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions for the good of the family,” he observes. The discarded workers smile back agreeably. They have bought into his myth too.
The first adage about comedy – that it is more difficult than drama – remains true, says Bardem firmly. “Every actor says that – and they are right. Making people laugh is harder than making them cry. And drama unites us all. The things that make sense or hurt us are mostly the same for everyone.” Humour, on the other hand, is much quirkier. And while there are comedians who can make anything sound funny, he doesn’t consider himself a comedian. Fortunately, he says, the comedy was all in the script. “You need a good situation, a good line – and in this film, I had many.”
What he can do as an actor, he says, is give that comic character a physical life. As Blanco, he commands every space, whether it be the entire factory floor when he addresses a meeting, or the personal space of anyone he wants to dominate, manipulate or seduce. For Bardem, the challenge of any role is to find that physicality. Sometimes he identifies a character as an animal: Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men was a shark, for example, while Captain Salazar in Pirates of the Caribbean was a bull. He laughs when reminded of this. Blanco was never an animal for him, he says. He was a human type who was all too familiar.
We found together the light and shadows of this man we all know,” he says. “He doesn’t belong only to Spain. He belongs where anyone with a little bit of power wants to hold on to it, no matter what.” They rehearsed for a month in the factory itself; he recalls a process that was initially analytical, but became increasingly instinctual. “Shortening the distances between you [and other people]. Invading the dignity of others. Blanco’s very social, very open; he’s not shy. You want to be with him; it’s fun to be with him. And then you see people who behave that way – or you remember yourself when you are that way, because we have everything within ourselves. And then you go ‘Ok, I remember how the body reacts to that’.”
It can make uncomfortable viewing later on, even at a gala premiere to the home crowd. “Yesterday we watched the movie,” Bardem says. “And I’m very happy to be with Fernando and proud of this movie, but it’s hard to watch yourself because you see yourself from every perspective possible, exposing things of your own self that you are not especially proud of, maybe.” Not that he agrees with actors who insist that their job is to defend their characters. “You have to try to understand, to imagine. It’s not that you have to feel like him. I don’t believe that. It’s a work of imagination. You can feel the opposite, that’s fine!“
Bardem grew up in a family of actors and directors with strong political views; his uncle Juan Antonio Bardem was imprisoned under General Franco for making anti-Fascist films. Bardem himself has weighed in on a succession of progressive causes, most recently climate change. From his mother, actress Pilar Bardem, he was bequeathed a conviction that creative work had to have more social significance than a way to make a living and, although most of his films have not been overtly political – recent work outside Spain has included Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and the film for which he was Oscar-nominated, Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos – he is choosy.
“I became aware that work can help shake and change minds,” he said in San Sebastian. “I don’t mean this in a grandiloquent manner, just that cinema can be a communication tool. The films I have made with Fernando, in particular, have a lot of that.” Being funny, as he is in The Good Boss, doesn’t detract from that sense of purpose. “Humour helps to reach out to the audience, tell them something that can move them, make them want to empathise with the world we try to convey, with its harsh realities. That is what art offers, whether it’s art, literature, cinema – a chance to reflect.”
The Good Boss opens on April 14, with preview screenings this weekend.
New film ‘The Good Boss’ shows how hard it is to be a likeable leader
In this intricate tale of intrigue and deceit, the king of deceivers constantly finds himself being played and deceived.
It’s a wonder there are not more movies like The Good Boss. Every small to medium-sized business is a potential comedy series, as management tries to maintain the illusion that a company is one big happy family, at least until the employees ask for a pay rise.
Javier Bardem’s Julio Blanco is a master operator when it comes to maintaining those double standards. It’s in the very nature of his business, which makes scales and weighing devices. Blanco is skilled at balancing everything. He weighs up his obligations to employees against his own profits, his love affairs against his happy marriage. His entire life is one big balancing act. The corollary of this is that the smallest upset can throw that equilibrium out of whack, which is precisely what happens in this droll, black comedy, written and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa.
It’s important to recognise that Blanco is no David Brent. In The Office. Ricky Gervais created a character desperate to be loved, who makes everyone cringe as soon as he opens his mouth. Bardem gives us a smooth, sophisticated hypocrite, well-versed in the arts of manipulating the people around him. His very name, which means “white”, attests to his false purity and the opaque nature of his personality.
With his sleek, grey coiffure and air of unflappable bonhomie, Blanco works hard at being an attractive, commanding figure. He has a wall covered in awards at home, and is looking forward to adding another soon. But on the verge of a crucial visit from an inspection committee, he encounters a series of unexpected problems.
First, there’s Fortuna (Celso Bugallo), an old and trusted employee who does extra handyman jobs at Blanco’s house. Fortuna’s son has got in trouble with the law. Blanco promises to use his influence to get the young man off the charge and into a steady job. It proves a lot harder than expected.
Then there is Miralles (Manolo Solo), the factory manager, whom Blanco has known since childhood. Miralles is going through a bad patch, screwing up orders and causing costly delays, forcing everyone else to scramble to repair the damage. As Miralles is important to Blanco’s fiction that he is running a family rather than a company, he makes a strenuous effort to find out what is wrong and get his old friend/employee back on track. The problem is between Miralles and his wife. But as Blanco tries to mediate, nothing goes according to plan.
Next there is José (Óscar de la Fuente), an employee who has been retrenched, but doesn’t go quietly. Instead, he sets up camp on a bare patch of ground outside the factory, parading around his two children and protesting Blanco’s inhumanity. This is exactly the kind of bad PR that would make a negative impression on the award inspection committee. But José proves hard to budge, having fallen in love with his newfound role as an anti-capitalist revolutionary.
Finally, there is new intern Liliana (newcomer Almudena Amor), who has caught Blanco’s roving eye. As a boss, he has a kind of feudal belief in the Droit du seigneur, whereby the lord of the manor was permitted to have first use of his nubile subjects. In modern, corporate times, this means taking a more-than-paternal interest in the welfare of any attractive female employee. Despite Blanco’s impressive self-confidence, there are intimations of disaster in this liaison, and the story does not disappoint.
The Good Boss is not a laugh-out-loud comedy but neither does it make us squirm in our seats, like any episode of The Office. Léon de Aranoa has crafted an intricate tale of intrigue and deceit in which Blanco, the king of deceivers, constantly finds himself being played and deceived by some other party. Each strand of the story methodically unravels, occasionally becoming intertangled on the way.
Bardem is obviously enjoying himself in this movie, playing a strong, charismatic leader who has to keep smiling as he deals with one crisis after another. Even when these problems are not of his own creation, he manages to make each of them significantly worse by thinking habitually in terms of his own best interests.
I couldn’t help recalling Malcolm Turnbull’s brief, eventful term as prime minister. Sometimes charisma is not enough, although it’s not a word that can be used in connection with either of the current contenders for Australia’s highest office.
Relentless pursuit
As a capitalist, Blanco does not operate under the same scrutiny as a politician, but he is thoroughly political in everything he does. Although the bottom line is his relentless pursuit of personal wealth and status, he has become so adept at fine-tuning his image that he is pained by any issue that threatens to damage this seamless façade.
With Miralles, who messes up again and again, the obvious response would be to give him the boot. But Blanco is reluctant to do so. We wonder, momentarily, if this reveals a generous aspect of the boss’s personality – a sentimental attachment to an old friend going through a bad patch. But it’s essentially the threat posed to his cosy vision of company-as-family that makes him persevere with his failing manager.
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The Good Boss is a movie filled with neat plot twists and brilliant details, held together by Bardem’s commanding performance. Viewers may feel they’ve never met anyone exactly like Blanco in the workplace. But plenty who have perfected at least one part of his act – the kind, benevolent boss who is forced to make difficult decisions, with a heavy heart, for the good of one and all.
It’s nothing personal, merely the result of a bleak economic climate. In such scenarios, some must stay and some must go. But it’s most important the survivors accept that the boss is working in their own best interests. The true conjuring trick is to convince the sacked employees to feel the same way.
The Good Boss
Written and directed by Fernando Léon de Aranoa
Starring: Javier Bardem, Manolo Solo, Almudena Amor, Óscar de la Fuente, Sonia Almarcha, Tarik Rmili, Fernando Albizu, Celso Bugallo, Mara Guil
Spain, rated M, 120 mins