The Good Boss (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Fernando León de Aranoa, Jaume Roures, and Javier Méndez; written and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa; edited by Vanessa Marimbert; cinematography by Pau Esteve Birba; production design by César Macarrón; music by Zeltia Montes; starring Javier Bardem, Manolo Solo, Almudena Amor, Óscar de la Fuente, Sonia Almarcha, Fernando Albizu, Tarik Rmili, Rafa Castejón, and Celso Bugallo. Blu-ray and DVD, color, Spanish dialogue with English subtitles, 120 min, 2021. A Kino Lorber release.

The Good Boss, a 2021 release known as El buen patrón in its native Spain, marks the third collaboration between writer-director-producer Fernando León de Aranoa and illustrious actor Javier Bardem, following Mondays in the Sun in 2002 and Loving Pablo in 2017. Like those films, The Good Boss combines social commentary and political critique, enhanced here by darkly comic observations on class inequity, professional privilege, and family life. It’s a smart, occasionally savage satire, and the new Kino Lorber edition shows it to full visual advantage.

Bardem is widely celebrated, but León de Aranoa is less familiar, although in Spanish-speaking countries he’s a well-respected auteur. In his student days he planned to be an artist, but he switched to cinema when an administrative error enrolled him in a film course, and he personally storyboards his movies to this day. He won his first Goya Award with his first feature and has racked up a sizable list of wins and nominations for both writing and directing in subsequent years, The Good Boss alone garnering a record-setting twenty Goyas along with honors from numerous other sources. His important pictures include Barrio (1998), a realistic drama set in a Madrid suburb and centered on three teenage boys with high hopes and low prospects; Princesas (2005), a tale of two Madrid sex workers, one of whom hails from the Dominican Republic, raising the theme of immigrant life that figures in multiple León de Aranoa films; Amador (2010), a rather dull effort about an immigrant moonlighting as caretaker for a sick old man whose death poses dire economic problems for her; and A Perfect Day (2015), a dramatic comedy about aid workers in the Balkans whose unpredictable travails involve labor and political issues that are also key concerns for the filmmaker. Loving Pablo is an eccentric docudrama with Bardem as the Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and Penélope Cruz as the television journalist who became his lover, and Mondays in the Sun, the film most comparable to The Good Boss, offers a sardonic yet compassionate take on problems of employment, masculinity, and marriage.

The title character of The Good Boss is Julio Blanco, the aggressively ingratiating capitalist who owns and operates Blanco Scales, a bustling outfit that makes and sells everything from bathroom models to large industrial devices. Julio takes pride in the notion that his company is a family and his employees are valued members of the clan, a well-worn trope that he never tires of repeating in the silver-tongued speeches he gives on noteworthy occasions. Just now it’s an exciting time at the organization since the regional government is about to bestow an award for business excellence and Julio is determined to add the prize to the many already displayed on the factory’s crowded wall of fame. But wouldn’t you know, unusual snags are cropping up despite his eagle-eyed supervision and morale-boosting rhetoric. The production manager, Miralles (Manolo Solo), is making one mistake after another, clearly preoccupied with something other than the smooth functioning of the plant—a something that turns out to be a strong suspicion that his wife is having an affair. Julio intercedes in the situation, exuding warmth over drinks with the distracted employee and visits to the errant spouse, but makes little meaningful impression on either of them. The poorly functioning manager poses a problem for the company’s internal operations, and another development threatens the public image that’s crucially important as decision day for the prize approaches. Furious about being laid off, a worker named Jose (Óscar de la Fuente) sets up a protest site across the street from the main entrance, draping it with angry banners, yelling rage-filled slogans through a bullhorn, and tampering with the perfectly balanced scales that decorate the factory’s entryway. Julio takes action to remove him, but the action fails, since the protester is on public land he has every right to occupy. What if he’s still hollering his amplified gripes when the prize committee comes by? On yet another front, the son of a loyal employee is in trouble with the law—the film opens with a burst of violent action quite different from the story’s overall tone—and Julio persuades his own wife, Adela (Sonia Almarcha), to give the troublemaker a job in her clothing boutique, a fashionable shop that hardly benefits when the young man and his friends spend their time smoking on the sidewalk in front. Nor is Julio himself a model of personal comportment. Some new female interns have joined the scale company, and tall, slender Liliana (Almudena Amor) immediately catches his eye, which has been caught by other interns in the past. Before long he’s giving her a ride home, and soon after that he’s sleeping with her. Evidently the good boss is not all that good where his marriage and morality are in play. 

Each of these situations has serious implications for Julio, his actual family, and his factory “family,” and each grows more complicated as the story proceeds. Miralles enlists him in a misbegotten attempt to stalk his wife by tracing her cellphone signal. Jose keeps on raving and ranting, intermittently supported by Román (Fernando Albizu), the very security guard who should be helping Julio get rid of him. And the intern Liliana is not quite the new presence Julio thought she was. In fact, he belatedly discovers, she’s the daughter of old family friends, and her parents are thrilled that she’s working with the man they regard as the best of all good bosses; late in the story, a cozy dinner with his freshly acquired mistress, her ingenuous parents, and his so-far-ignorant wife is an ordeal of embarrassment for the normally unflappable gent. The impending visit from the award committee looms ever larger, Julio’s smug confidence grows ever shakier, and his escalating anxieties lead him to actions more drastic and dangerous than anything he’s done before. 

Appropriately for a movie about a scale manufacturer, The Good Boss strikes a generally fine balance among its narrative elements and underlying themes. At an allegorical level, the film suggests a fundamental hollowness in contemporary capitalism by associating the economic system’s patriarchal, faux-accommodating claims with the phony nature of Julio’s workplace “family,” where employees are really just employees subject to the status inequalities, wage disparities, and arbitrary layoffs that enable profit-making enterprises to keep making profits. More subtly, dubious capitalist traditions are also evoked by the sham fidelity Julio brings to his marriage, a seemingly self-sustaining partnership with hidden deception at its core. His sexual relationship with Liliana indicts capitalist power inequities as well, although León de Aranoa is a mischievous enough storyteller to imply that the intern is exploiting the boss as much as the boss is exploiting her. The film’s treatment of the endlessly disgruntled Jose is no less mischievous, depicting a laborer with legitimate complaints whose righteous anger grows so irrational that he literally shits in those decorative scales and figuratively shits on Julio, whose fingers are befouled when he discovers the mess. It’s a suitably disgusting metaphor for the ethical stench contaminating his business, his household, and his life. 

The balancing act of The Good Boss gets wobbly in spots. Although some of León de Aranoa’s earlier films show a keen interest in the problems of immigrants living in adopted lands, this movie has only one immigrant character, a worker named Khaled (Tarik Rmili) whose ambitions put him on a collision course with Miralles, and he never becomes more than a cipher, so underwritten that his presence seems like a box-checking gesture by the filmmaker. There’s also a significant flaw in the screenplay’s structure. The story unfolds in sections named after the days of a single week, and when a character meets his death in the second of the film’s notably violent episodes, his funeral takes place on what’s apparently the same day, highly unlikely timing for a Spanish burial. More than one critic has found The Good Boss to be overlong, too slowly paced, or both, and the hastiness of this segment hints that León de Aranoa may have expected that criticism and overcompensated in advance. Perhaps he was trying to follow one of Julio’s maxims: “Sometimes you have to trick the scale to get the exact weight.” But whatever the case, these are minor hitches.   

On a brighter note, the dialogue is often sharp and sometimes very funny. I especially like Jose’s chats with security guard Román, a verbally clever chap with ready advice on improving the protester’s chants and banners. When he suggests the slogan “Blanco, slave driver, you will burn in hell,” for instance, Jose objects that the Spanish words don’t fully rhyme; Román says they do rhyme but in an “assonant” and “modern” way; Jose reasonably observes that a protest sign “doesn’t have to be modern, it has to be efficient”; and Román responds, “You don’t think ‘you will burn in hell’ is efficient?” This isn’t exactly a Preston Sturges-level exchange, but it’s the sort of wry humor that leavens what could have seemed an excessively cynical story.

Not surprisingly, the picture’s greatest asset is Bardem’s richly nuanced performance, which manages to be oily and engaging in about equal measure, making it hard to like Julio and still harder to hate him. We’ve known for years how broad and varied Bardem’s range is, stretching from his comic turns for Pedro Almodóvar to his incarnation of evil in Joel and Ethan Coen’s 2007 No Country for Old Men and his potbellied slob in León de Aranoa’s own Loving Pablo, and while Julio Blanco may not prove to be one of his most memorable roles, he gives the smarmy CEO a go-getting vitality that has its own sort of creepy charm. The supporting cast is mostly excellent, but Bardem tops them all, and León de Aranoa deserves great credit for showcasing his particular gifts so effectively. When he’s on the screen The Good Boss is very, very good. While the Kino Lorber edition has no extras beyond a trailer and a few he-was-so-great-to-work-with interview videos, it’s a welcome addition to the Spanish cinema library.

David Sterritt is editor-in-chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and author or editor of fifteen film-related books.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2