A Dumb Joke of History
Coming on the heels of Thirteen Days, Company Man
is the latest look at the troubled relationship
between the United States and Cuba. Whereas trailers
for Thirteen Days showcase the tense,
behind-the-scenes U.S. politics during the Cuban
Missile Crisis, Company Man is a comedy about the
Bay of Pigs, set in Cuba. The idea is not as
far-fetched as it might seem. The failure of this
U.S.-backed invasion when Fidel Castro rose to power
was so complete that it is itself a kind of historical
comedy of errors, a ridiculously ill-conceived plot to
oust the Communist leader with a makeshift flotilla of
fishing boats. Nearly fifty years later, the outrage
inspired by Castro is tempered for most Americans by
the fall of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War.
Now the U.S. can afford to laugh at the misadventures
of the Bay of Pigs. Unfortunately, Company Man
offers precious little to laugh about.
The Company Man is actually Alan Quimp (Douglas
McGrath), a 1950s Greenwich, Connecticut grammar and
Drivers' Ed instructor who obsesses over dangling
participles while his wife, Daisy (Sigourney Weaver),
harangues him about his pitiful salary and low-profile
job. When Quimp's father takes Daisy's side, demanding
that his son devote himself to a life of "six figure
salaries," "ulcers," and "three-martini lunches,"
Quimp invents a job for himself as an undercover agent
with the CIA. Arguing that no one would suspect such a
meek and ineffectual person of actually
being a top-secret spy, Quimp convinces his father and
Daisy that he is, in fact, a government agent.
This seems to solve Quimp's problems, until the
world-famous Russian ballet dancer Rudolph Petrov
(Ryan Phillippe) makes an appearance at Quimp's
country club. In her excitement over her husband's
improved career prospects, Daisy tells Petrov (as she
has told everyone) about Quimp's position in the CIA.
Petrov then convinces the unwitting Quimp to help him
defect ("defecate," as Petrov mangles it) to America.
Quimp does so by whisking him away from Russian guards
in one of his student driver's cars, and in doing so,
catches the attention of the real CIA, who decide to
hire him as a bonafide agent to research the "rumors"
of revolution circulating in Cuba.
Special Agent Quimp arrives in Cuba to find the local
CIA blissfully ignorant of the coming Communist
revolution. Quimp's superior, Lowther (Woody Allen),
lights his cigarettes on Batista effigies burnt in
demonstration and spends all his time bemoaning Cuban
cuisine and service. Quimp's partner, Agent Fry (Denis
Leary), turns out to be a double agent, confessing to
his crime in order to put a stop to Quimp's continual
correction of his bad grammar. Soon after, to the
CIA's surprise and no one else's, Castro (Anthony
LaPaglia) comes to power and deposes the
U.S.-supported General Batista (Alan Cumming). It is
left to Quimp to assassinate Castro and restore
Batista to power.
The remainder of the film focuses on Quimp's efforts
to eliminate the pesky Castro and bring capitalism
back to Cuba. He enlists the help of the manic Agent
Johnson (John Turturro), who cuts himself with knives
and threatens to do worse in order to demonstrate his
hatred for the evil
"bear" of Communism, as well as Daisy (who has come to
Cuba to write a best-selling novel based on her
husband's top secret adventures), and the effeminate
Batista (who is concerned that Castro will ruin the
interior decorating of his presidential mansion), and
proceeds to botch several attempts on Castro's life
with farcical ineptitude. The comedy is ostensibly
derived from such moments as when Quimp tries to spray
a syringe of poison into Castro's coffee mug, but
misses and ends up staining the previously clean scalp
of visiting Russian ambassador Mikhail Gorbachev. Or,
a scene where Quimp is forced to drink the LSD-tainted
water intended for
Castro and undergoes a psychedelic freak-out on
national television, mesmerized by a "mongoose" in his
pants. These slapstick gags recall the Naked Gun and
Hot Shots films, that made fun of Saddam Hussein and
the Queen of England in passing, but did not rely
solely on such political buffoonery to carry them. And
buffoonery is the only word to describe the goofy
shenanigans that pass for comedy in Company Man.
Quimp's many attempts and miserable failures are
noteworthy, though, in that they mirror the historical
bungling of the CIA. Schemes to taint Castro's
drinking water with LSD, slip him a chemical that
would make his beard fall out, and poison his cigars
all seem in keeping with the comedic clowning of the
film, but are all really inspired by actual plans
hatched by the U.S. government during the Cold War. It
would seem that the only way to retell the historical
idiocy of the U.S. involvement with the Bay of Pigs
and its repeated inability to oust Castro is through
the kind of dumb joking that constitutes the humor in
Company Man. This idea of history as a joke is
carried even farther at the end of the film, which
sees Agent Quimp transferred out of Cuba to a
previously unheard of country called Vietnam. We can
only hope that those misadventures won't merit a
sequel to this film.
