The power of a good family man.(In Good Company)(Movie Review)

Those of us who detected a glimmer of maturity in the seminal 1999 teen sex comedy American Pie have been vindicated of late by its director, Paul Weitz. With About a Boy, in which a solipsistic womanizer finds truer companionship with a fatherless kid, and now, In Good Company, Weitz has revealed himself to be an acute social observer, a familial storyteller, and a budding moralist.

Who would have guessed such words would one day describe the same man who gained prominence by portraying a teen's amorous relations with baked goods? Though Weitz can still be uncouth, his pictures increasingly wrestle with important, everyday matters like tough love and family life, from a welcome and grounded perspective.

In Good Company stars Dennis Quaid--showcasing the same rumpled charm he wore so well in the 2002 baseball drama, The Rookie--as Dan Foreman, a veteran sales manager for a sports magazine that gets swallowed up by a corporate conglomerate. Enter the new boss, Carter Duryea (Topher Grace)--brash, cocky, and, worst of all, just 26 years old.

Combine an unexpected pregnancy for Dan and his wife Ann (Mart Helgenberger), an increasingly independent soon-off-to-college daughter Alex (Scarlett Johansson), and her budding relationship with Carter, and the 51-year-old dad is quickly on the verge of a mid-life crisis. Yet writer/director Weitz, in a sly twist, decides not to push Dan off the deep end. The film instead places its faith in Dan's foundations--his commitment on the home front, his old-fashioned work ethic--and confidently guides its beleaguered, everyman hero through the shoals of middle age.

As part of the film's twist, it becomes the young, upstart Carter, not Dan, whose life gets turned upside down. Weitz is too much of a humanist to allow Carter to become a one-note villain, and Topher Grace--a headliner-in-waiting who has stolen brief scenes in the likes of Traffic and Ocean's Twelve--too good of an actor to settle for a simple, smug role. Carter is brash, certainly, but also unsure of himself. His first meeting with Dan and his sales team is a disastrous trip over the generation gap. It isn't until Dan realizes his new boss is just a scared ...