In the Company of lien The Game Men playing boys' games

...This seems to me the final, powerful import of a small and powerful film...

...Yet most of Company is trenchant...

...The story unfolds through a series of duologues, each one of them written by a man who knows how to distill the colloquial into language that can sting, skewer or, more rarely, caress...

...While discussing their recent romantic setbacks with women, they decide to avenge their sex by separately dating a young woman (good-looking but appraised by Chad as vulnerable because of her deafness), making her feel like a love goddess with two men under her thumb, and then abruptly dumping her...

...Nicholas Van Orton (Michael Douglas) is an investment banker who crushes weak sister companies, forcibly retires kind old publishers, and worst of all snaps at waitresses, but he's beyond the enjoyment of power or anything else...

...But a not-so-tiny savagery Chad's forcing an intern to lower his pants in order to prove that the young man has the "balls" to succeed in business doesn't come across as the black comedy that LaBute aimed for, but as grotesque nonsense that should have been left on the cutting-room floor...

...I don't know if Neil LaBute has read Les Liaisons Dangereuses or seen one of its several screen adaptations, but his story progresses along the same narrative lines: a cold-blooded sexual intrigue enmeshing an innocent...

...This apparently trivial scene is actually a premonition of Howard's fate, for it is Howard's need to seem to be in control that entangles him in Chad's scheme, and it is his uncertainty about who he is and what he is worth that accelerates the concluding emotional smash-up...

...Gee, how evil can I actually be...

...Then his dissolute younger brother brings a birthday present: enrollment in The Game, a recreation service that is supposed to lift the spirits of the jaded businessman by taking him on the urban equivalent of a safari...

...The thrills start small...

...However, if s fun the first time around...

...Fun, fun, fun...

...No slap, however hard, can crack that shell, or be but the faintest protest against love betrayed and tenderness despised...

...In such an environment, can we achieve self-determination only by arranging our own deaths...

...There is no other physical violence in the movie, yet Company is such a precise little study of well-channeled hate and disrupting love that, by the time that blow is delivered, you feel like a witness to a massacre...

...We awake from its enjoyable nightmare only to confront the less encompassing but more veracious menaces of everyday life, the sort of menaces brilliantly on display in In the Company of Men...

...Cut to a close-up of Howard...

...in fact at first they're only irritations...

...Suffice it to say that the perpetrators of the hoax could only have achieved their goal by having total control not just over Van Orton's schedule but over life itself, or at least over the entire city of San Francisco...

...As Christine, Stacy Edwards, who's not deaf, presents the handicap so unfussily that we just accept it, never finding it a source of pathos, and are thereby prepared for the real pathos of an intelligent woman groping her way through a peculiarly masculine brand of human darkness...

...This movie is pop paranoia, Kafka for yuppies...

...In the less magnetic role of Howard, Matt Malloy negotiates a double feat: first, he lets us see how a wimpy guy can contain a fair measure of venom...

...LaBute presents us with marvelous disjunctions between what we hear and what we see...

...Chad talking to his pal about his first date with Christine (which we haven't witnessed) acknowledges her good looks but then mocks the way saliva gathers in the corner of her mouth as the deaf girl struggles to form sounds...

...You see, if I'm to obey the unwritten but iron rule that reviewers mustn't reveal surprise endings, I can't really specify the movie's one major fault...

...Almost every shift of viewpoint indicates a shift in the narrative or an alteration of our perception of a character...

...Things fall into place for The Game all too easily and, thinking over the story after the end credits roll, most viewers will probably discover that the script just doesn't add up...

...Two thirty-something executives, former college buddies Chad and Howard, are staying for six weeks in a nameless city to oversee some changes in a branch of their company...

...My one major criticism of LaBute is that he does not allow the character of the more ruthless schemer, Chad, to expand within his evil the way Laclos amplified the malevolence of the Marquise de Merteuil in Liaisons...

...SCREEN Richard Alleva JUST BUSINESS 'In the Company of Men' & 'The Game Near the conclusion of Neil LaBute' s debut feature film, In the Company of Men, a woman, in tears and rage, slaps a man once, very hard...

...Chad seems to wonder...

...The Game doesn't invite careful consideration or second viewings...

...The telephonic nuisance turns out to be Howard's mother pestering him about his love life...

...This makes us realize that Chad must create a pathetic, repellent Christine in his mind's eye (and in Howard's) so that it will be easier to hurt her...

...Seen from a distance, Howard is in charge but up close he is all nerves and evasiveness...

...This movie begins with a whiff of fire and brimstone but concludes as an update of The Organization Man...

...There is an O. Henry twist near the end of Company that injects another dose of grim-ness into an already mordant film, which is fine, but that also too cleverly pinpoints Chad's sadism as a mere characteristic of the ruthless business world...

...Naturally, things do not go precisely as planned...

...Later, we see Christine speaking in close-up...

...The low-keyed atmosphere gives us a world where tiny savageries can take place daily with little fuss...

...Another businessman and quite another sort of hoax are the centerpieces of The Game...

...She does indeed struggle with her speech but there's no saliva, no gro-tesqueness at all...

...We have been told that love is stronger than hate...

...LaBute cuts from one shot to another not just with precision but with a sense of momentousness...

...The photography by Tony Hettinger deftly captures the beige look, no, the beige feel of afternoon light seeping through blinds in spartanly furnished offices...

...briefcases don't open, toilets overflow, pens leak...

...The Game disarms the critics as ruthlessly as it divests its hero...

...As Howard nervously ducks her questions, the underling returns...

...Van Orton decides to fight back...

...For instance, we see Howard and an underling in the former's office while the executive fends off what seems to be an aggressive salesperson on the phone...

...later, Malloy's powerful projection of Howard's desperation burns right through his wimpiness...

...until our hero wakes up in a crypt in a Mexican border town, sans money, credit cards, bank funds, business connections, the family mansion, identity papers, and perhaps without any identity at all...

...But, in such an environment, will even our suicides be stage-managed...

...And this is no marathon of talking heads because the director has an unfailing sense of where to place the camera and how long to leave it there...

...This is in extreme long shot with the camera placed outside the office...

...Cut to the former long-shot as Howard abruptly ends the conversation and turns, competent and brisk once again, to his subordinate...

...But the misadventures escalate and how...

...finally, an unmasking of evil that brings as much pain to one of the predators as to his prey...

...The director David Fincher (maker of the powerfully gruesome Seven and the underrated third installment in the Alien series) specializes in doomy narratives and even doomier cityscapes...

...Howard sends the underling off on an errand...

...On his forty-eighth birthday, Van Orton is haunted by the suicide of his father at the same age and seems to be inching toward the same fate...

...Perhaps that's true, but surely it is also true that love forces us to grow and growth is confusing and painful, while hate lets us curl up in the shell of ego, that all too cozy refuge...

...His main achievement here is to make us share the hero's growing apprehension that nothing is real, that rooms are stage sets, that femmes fatales are merely reciting lines, that the family lawyer is a scam artist, that people are beginning to resemble each other because they are each other...

...civil war between the intriguers when one of them falls in love with his victim...

...Aaron Eckhart easily encompasses the flippant brutality of Chad and even manages to expand what LaBute has written by introducing a note of boyish quizzicality...

...Evil is his Disneyland, a new joyride around every corner...