If Fernando León de Aranoa's newest feature The Good Boss (original title: El buen patrón) is a workplace comedy, it’s a drily vicious and draining one. Don’t be misled by the often-playful soundtrack or predictable charm of its lead, as the film’s bleak resolutions are scripted from its first scene. Javier Bardem fires on all cylinders as Boss Blanco, the blandly despicable head honcho of a manufacturing company that produces industrial scales, mustering a personality built entirely of surface materials and a constant appetite for synthetic accolades and extramarital sexual conquests. The Good Boss is a pitch-black comedy with a pitch-perfect performance by Bardem, playing prime dartboard fodder for the proletariat.
A hate crime introduces the film’s workplace dramatics, with a trio of MENA (Middle East and North African) youths sharing a joint in a park at night before being accosted by a group of tattooed, moped-riding delinquents. The attackers’ arrest segues into a yawn-inducing corporate monologue delivered via cherry picker to the factory employees of Básculas Blancos, workers who Boss Blanco unironically deems his “children.” The company has been nominated for a business award for excellence and Blanco wants to ensure that the gears turn flawlessly for the award committee’s expectant arrival.
Most every scene in the film hangs on Bardem’s weirdly magnetic turn as Blanco, a mix that blends imposing charisma with a dopey public-facing grin, fluffy gray mop, and paternal heaviness. It’s his big-time “dad energy” which completes the façade, a defensive shield hiding his libertine pursuits and a simmering, spooky rage which rarely surfaces to breathe. And still, the character is less of a calculated or conniving monster than an impetuous one, a person in power who musters life-altering rulings on a dime and disposes with members of his inner circle as needed.
In true black comedy fashion, The Good Boss toys with lionizing its central character to the audience, offering a shotgun seat through his struggles and accomplishments. When the marital troubles of childhood friend and shop captain Miralles (Manolo Solo) bubble up, Blanco’s supportive presence and encouraging back rubs may appear as the considerate reactions of a confidante. In truth, he’s just doing his best to shore up the factory’s harmony, a pretense to accompany that upcoming umpteenth award, a plaque to fill space on a wall among dozens of its brethren.
So, no, Blanco doesn’t consider his employees as family or progeny, although the speech adds an incestuous layer to his pursuit of Liliana (Almudena Amor), a recent intern he fails to recognize as the adult daughter of an associate. She’s but one of a revolving door of interns he’s similarly stalked as prey, members of his slow daily cruises past the factory’s bus stop to creep on fresh hires. He misjudges her, though, just as he misjudges recently canned employee Jose, who has set up a one-man protest zone by the factory to shatter its peaceful veneer. With all his anti-capitalist bullhorn rants and taunts, Jose becomes Blanco’s “villain,” if he truly has any.
The challenge for the film is to find its metaphorical equilibrium when almost every aspect is as chilly and obvious as its clinical color palette. The scales factory concept is mined for any apparent depth and therefore leaves little to explore, and an excellent moment which offers Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights” as Blanco’s own internal blustery theme is lovely, but also inert and final. There’s even a quick but considered shot that blends Blanco’s mock grave – a piece of homemade agitprop constructed by Jose – as a burning cross. The symbolism is always there on the screen, just far from subtle.
Similar in certain ways to Willem Dafoe’s incredible turn as a down-to-earth shlub in The Florida Project, Bardem’s Blanco is always eerily recognizable and accessible, a standout among contemporary roles which usually find him in larger-than-life exhibition. Blanco is the kind of relaxed tyrant who is so rarely brought down from his cloud, and the film’s greatest scene takes place at a dinner he is unprepared for, one where his wife quickly corrects his own self-made man mythology by reminding him that he inherited the business from his father. It’s a reality hiccup for a man who’s made his riches by believing and walking and succeeding within those lies.
For those awaiting Blanco’s eventual and deserved dethroning, it’s best to seek another quarry. The Good Boss ultimately manifests as more of a grim statement on the ineffable durability of privilege than anything else, echoing the anti-resolutions and injustices found in films like Crimes and Misdemeanors. The casual monsters persist and the employees get ground down; even Liliana’s eventual comeuppance is mired in dismal compromise and manipulation. She’ll go far, much like Blanco, or anyone who knows how to play the game, fall in line, and then strike at opportunity’s call. The rest can punch in and punch out evermore. Like Básculas Blancos itself, there’s a message here that balance isn’t universal or even natural. It’s forged, faked, and sold.
The Good Boss released in limited theaters on Friday, August 26, and will expand to more theaters on September 2. The film is 116 minutes long and is unrated.