Mark Reviews Movies: THE GOOD BOSS

The Good Boss, Cohen Media Group

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 25, 2022

The title The Good Boss comes inherently loaded. Just in terms of language, the original Spanish title refers to a "patrón," which one can take generously as the informal term for a boss or on a more sinister level, given its historical role to define a slave-master. The man to whom the title ironically refers clearly believes himself to fir the first category, since he pronounces that his company is akin to a family.

As such, he serves as the father to various children and, as employee's tenure increases over the years, as friends or even brothers (The boss never mentions the notion of any sisters in that metaphor, just to point out an obvious gap in his familial logic). If any of his workers have a problem, he has one, too. After all, that's how family is supposed to work, right? Forget that he sees his metaphorical father as the central and most important figure of this business clan, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of him being something other than a boss. It sounds good, to be sure, but just like the man himself, if you think about or look at the metaphor with any kind of inspection, it all falls apart, revealing a not-so-kind, not-so-friendly, and not-so-good truth.

Anyway, writer/director Fernando León de Aranoa's film, a broad satire that works better as an incisive character study of a pretty familiar character, puts forth a simple question: What makes a good boss? Is it someone who only thinks of the business and sees employees as simply that, or is it someone who thinks on a more personal level and perceives employees to be akin to members of an extended family?

Some might argue that, at least, the first way of thinking is honest (Anyone who has attempted to be friendly with a boss knows that the actual nature of the relationship will emerge sooner or later—and often with ill consequences for the person who dares to trust that illusion). If there's one thing we quickly learn about Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem), there's not an honest thought in his head.

The man is charming, to be sure, and surely, that ingratiates him with the interns, workers, supervisors, managers, and department heads at a scale manufacturing company that he owns and runs. People believe him, because he looks and sounds sincere when he speaks of family and caring about his employees. Indeed, Bardem is the kind of performer who can veer between the two extremes of this character—as well as live in the discomforting amorality and apathy between the fake kindness and real cutthroat quality of the man—with ease and equal levels of conviction.

Bardem's performance is the highlight here, and León de Aranoa, who has written something between a workplace thriller and a comedy of errors that details how badly Blanco messes up his life and makes everyone else suffer for it, knows that fact. The plot here, which has Blanco trying to make the company look perfect for an upcoming visit from a local award-granting body, is as fundamentally clever as it is familiar, although the ways in and degree to which things do go wrong for the boss possess a mounting level of complication, stickiness, and danger.

In this way, the film works as a comedy, because León de Aranoa ensures that we know of Blanco's true character early and often. It's smart enough, though, to let us see the consequences for those who, unlike the sardonically eponymous protagonist, do not have the same level of power and cunning that he possesses.

The narrative basically provides Blanco with a series of problems—often of his own making—and trials to confront. He routinely fails them. One is the matter of Jose (Óscar de la Fuente), an employee whom Blanco recently fired in some layoffs. He spends the rest of the story protesting the man and his company across the street from the entrance, decrying Blanco for leaving him homeless, without any future job prospects, and at a disadvantage to have any custody of his children.

On the flip side, he does help the son of Fortuna (Celso Bugallo), although the circumstances of that help—after the young man beat a couple of immigrants in the park—doesn't bode well for how loyalty overpowers all else in his mind. Beyond that, there's the terrible payoff to Blanco's knowledge of the young man's capacity for violence.

Another challenge exists in his close "friend" Miralles (Manolo Solo), the head of production who has been with the company for 20 years, known Blanco for longer, and is convinced that his wife (played by Mara Guil) is having an affair. Blanco's own wife Adela (Sonia Almarcha), by the way, is basically a non-entity here, which saves us from a potential cliché or two but definitely feels like a missed opportunity for something.

Perhaps her relative absence from the story is simply because Blanco's marriage means little to him. He has affairs, too, usually with young company interns such as Liliana (Almudena Amor). She seems like little more than a target for Blanco to woo and bed, but it's his objectification and dismissal of her as a person, an employee, and a member of his "family" that makes him miss something he really should know about her.

León de Aranoa picks apart this man and his true self with a fine sense of dark humor, while Bardem gets at the slimy, manipulative heart beneath Blanco's appealing exterior. The Good Boss isn't a unique or meticulous character study, but it is an effective and pointed one.

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