Alas, life can never quite be as precisely calibrated as one of his products and things soon begin to go haywire.
The aforementioned talk with his workers is a rally-the-troops affair for Blanco, who has been shortlisted as one of the three finalists for an award described as “the Oscar of scales.” This may sound tacky to you (if still more prestigious than a Golden Globe) but Blanco is determined to win it at all costs he's certain that when the judges visit the factory and see the benevolent brotherhood he has established, the prize will be his. We also see, from the way that he deals with a pretty intern leaving the firm (with a piece of jewelry as a going-away trinket) that perhaps he favors some of his children in more particular ways than others. However, we soon begin to notice that some of his favors do come with a catch and his interest in the outside lives of some of his employees is a bit overbearing. And at first glance, he does appear to be a benevolent fatherly figure who is willing to go out of his way to help his “children”-when the son of a longtime employee is arrested for beating up an immigrant in a park, Blanco arranges for the kid to work at the dress store run by his wife, Adela ( Sonia Almarcha). When he speaks to his employees in an early scene, he stresses that he sees them as family. I found myself too often wishing that it could have been delivered in a film that could offer it a better framing.īardem plays Julio Blanco, the top man at Basculas Blanco, a business dedicated to making industrial scales. At the same time, there is a marvelous central performance from Javier Bardem that's as quiet and precise as the surrounding movie isn’t.
The film as a whole is pretty broad in its humor and observations in ways that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. That is the basic problem with “The Good Boss,” Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s attempt to skewer the corporate mindset that employees of a company are all one big family, although that means the higher-up "parents" get to sit back and ponder such concepts while the “children” do the work. But when the two approaches are combined, the result can be a messy, unsatisfying clash of comedic tones that never create a cohesive whole. Either one is perfectly valid and can yield enormous laughs when deployed properly.
When it comes to satire, two basic approaches can be used-one can go big and broad, ensuring that everyone gets the joke, or one can do it with such subtlety that some not paying attention might mistakenly assume the work is endorsing the very things it's making fun of.
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