The Good Boss

If you want to see a heavy­weight world champ fight­ing in a pid­dling feath­er­weight bout, look no fur­ther than Fer­nan­do León de Aranoa’s The Good Boss, in which Javier Bar­dem goes full sit­com as the appar­ent­ly benev­o­lent own­er of a pre­mi­um scales con­cern based out in the Span­ish sticks.

A slick sil­ver fox whose years at the helm have left him feel­ing omnipo­tent towards dis­cord, his sole pro­fes­sion­al goal is to receive an award for busi­ness excel­lence thus seal­ing his rep­u­ta­tion as one of the country’s most preva­lent lead­ers in man­u­fac­tur­ing. Achiev­ing this goal, how­ev­er, takes more than uphold­ing stur­dy and moral­ly forth­right work­place prac­tices: he is a man whose craven desire for con­trol takes him towards the very edge of ruin.

Bar­dem as the for­mi­da­ble Señor Blan­co at one point offers a col­league an, ​“offer [he] can’t refuse”, and read­i­ly acknowl­edges he is aware of the phrase’s chill­ing cul­tur­al rel­e­vance. He doesn’t, how­ev­er, realise that his small but mean­ing­ful abus­es of pow­er, and the micro-aggres­sions that exude from his macho body lan­guage, have lead him to be both feared and revered as a kind of Mafia capo, albeit a some­what fool­ish one.

The film is sim­ple to the point of being whol­ly pre­dictable, as Blan­co attempts to ​“fix” the var­i­ous HR prob­lem ahead of a big exter­nal inspec­tion, but dis­cov­ers that his super­fi­cial solu­tions and can only get him so far. One unfor­tu­nate ex-employ­ee builds a protest camp at the gate of the fac­to­ry. He com­plains (in turgid rhyme) that Blan­co won’t give him a fair shake and refus­es to move. Despite his var­i­ous attempts at dis­cre­tion, Blan­co realise that he can’t just sweep the man aside, and so as the plot rolls on, the expect­ed nuclear option comes clos­er to fruition.

The func­tion­al­ly direct­ed The Good Boss doesn’t draw on the com­e­dy of humil­i­a­tion like the sim­i­lar­ly-inclined TV show The Office, and it always remains with­in the bounds of rea­son why Blan­co has man­aged to attain the posi­tion he has. His con­stant laps­es into mis­judg­ment, sex­ism, racism and elit­ism speak of a white col­lar class blind to the casu­al malev­o­lence they spew over their staff every day, and Bar­dem achieves this with­out ever mak­ing his char­ac­ter come across as a mon­eyed mon­ster. Yet, is ​“boss­es are bas­tards” real­ly news?

This idea that bend­ing the rules even a tiny bit opens us up to reprisals is over­bear­ing­ly rep­re­sent­ed in Almu­de­na Amor’s femme fatale intern Lil­iana, whose entire arc is obvi­ous from the first time she’s seen strut­ting across the fac­to­ry floor and flick­ing her hair coquet­tish­ly to attract the atten­tion of the God-like bossman.

It’s a decent­ly con­struct­ed piece of fluff that is way too soft to exert any real last­ing impact. Yet the rea­son to see it is for Bardem’s mas­ter­ful, com­plete­ly com­mit­ted lead turn. The real com­e­dy gold comes from his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it expres­sions and man­ner­isms that usu­al­ly come when he’s lis­ten­ing to oth­er peo­ple talk.

Last thing: it’s com­plete­ly baf­fling that this film has become an awards dar­ling in Spain, trump­ing the (infi­nite­ly supe­ri­or in every way) Par­al­lel Moth­ers by Pedro Almod­ó­var at every turn. A bit of a trav­es­ty, all told.