Starring Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper, and Tommy Lee Jones. Rated PG.

Although there was a tragic story, or a couple of them, lurking beneath the laughter in Up in the Air, last year’s cinematic ode to corporate downsizing, The Company Men goes the other way. The gloom on its surface overlays a moody satire of America losing its way, both at work and at home.

The tale centres on three well-heeled white men who’ve devoted their lives to a Boston shipbuilding company currently facing hard times. When Ben Affleck’s youngish sales executive, Bobby Walker, is suddenly axed, he goes into denial despite wake-up calls from his levelheaded wife (a nicely understated Rosemarie DeWitt). Even more freaked out is middle-aged Phil (Chris Cooper), a former shop-floor worker now working under second-in-command Gene (a movie-stealing Tommy Lee Jones), who founded the company with a sharky CEO (Craig T. Nelson) now looking for ever more ways to cut costs and drive up market share.

The Porsche-driving Bobby refuses to take the downwardly mobile step of accepting a construction job from his wife’s cranky older brother (Kevin Costner, also restrained). But the lack of employers offering 160 Gs a year does eventually force some lessons in humility.

First-time feature writer-director John Wells—previously a big shot on ER and The West Wing—carefully frames the callow lives of the main trio, all living beyond their means, or at least their morals. Only Jones’s elder statesman has insights into how the game is rigged. A subplot involving his extramarital affair with a sleek executive played by Maria Bello appears to have been imported from a longer version of the movie, made before the current round of bank failures. Instead, I would have cut the speeches near the end, most of which merely make explicit what was already carefully rendered in the film’s fine and darkly amusing first half.