Grace, Quaid are great 'Company'

"My wife left me, and today is the anniversary of our first date, and I found the idea of going home to be so depressing that I kind of leeched onto your dad and invited myself over for dinner," 26-year-old corporate hot shot Carter Duryea tells Alex, the daughter of 51-year-old family man Dan Foreman, as he joins the Foreman family for dinner one night in Paul Weitz's charming film "In Good Company."\n"Wow," Alex replies. "You're sort of a bizarrely honest guy, huh?"\nWell, Weitz's movie is sort of bizarrely honest itself, and a really good movie at that. It's a movie about men, about the sharkish and cutthroat world of corporate America and the egos you may step on as you go about your way. It's also an honest movie concerning its idealistic and noble view of what it takes to make a happy man and the duties of nurturing, loving and providing for your family. \nDennis Quaid embodies these qualities effortlessly in his portrayal of Dan, the veteran ad exec bumped down a few rungs on the office ladder by a media conglomerate purchase. Dan is dedicated to his work and to his friends, and takes pride in providing for his family, including getting his daughter Alex (Scarlett Johansson) into NYU, even when it takes a second mortgage. \nTopher Grace doesn't embody the noble qualities at all in Carter, but he earnestly wants to and that's the only reason the audience doesn't hate him. Carter is as devoted to work as much as Dan, but he doesn't quite seem to understand why. Carter wisely allows Dan to retain a job while giving himself an obvious father figure to admire and learn from. Grace's performance is without a doubt on par with Quaid's, and it's nice to see him get a movie that allows him to explore the dynamics of his character.\nWeitz strikes me as a writer and director who knows how to pay attention to detail. He and his brother Chris Weitz previously directed in the high-quality "About a Boy," a toothier film that had more of a humanistic bite. The films share similar themes of resisting responsibility and adulthood, though, while futilely pursuing some unfulfilling notion of happiness. Weitz smartly knows how to crack open his characters to get to their emotional and most realistic core.\nEven if the story falters a little bit (which I think it does, especially as a flat romance develops between Carter and Alex), Weitz's clever writing and unpredictable narrative as well as the stellar performances by Quaid and Grace make "In Good Company" a sharp and funny comedy and a sweet and charming drama, which together should be difficult to pass up and more difficult to dislike.