The Good Boss

Blanco (Bardem), the titular boss of an industrial scales manufacturer in El Buen Patrón (The Good Boss), is preparing the factory to be reviewed for his thousandth award for excellence, and things keep going wrong.

As the mayordomo of a company whose literal mission is equilibrium, Blanco is in a constant state of tweaking and rebalancing his employees’ lives to keep them in line and achieve a veneer of stability at any cost. Whether he eventually does is beside the point – the havoc wreaked by his single-minded power hunger speaks volumes about his business, and perhaps most business, on its own.

A motley crew of characters, each with their own vignettes that Blanco meddles in, makes The Good Boss feel like The Office, a delicious, dry, ensemble satire, but Bardem’s inherent magnetism veers it into Shakespearean/Succession territory. He’s obsessed with paternalistic control of his employees’ lives, maintaining one of those awful “we’re a family” workplaces even as he literally tells an intern at one point, “I own you.” As he tries to solve the two major obstacles to winning his award – a longtime employee dragging at work due to marital woes, and a disgruntled sackee publicly protesting the factory – he takes a little here to give a little there, literally rebalancing the scales of the factory. He takes noise-blocking headphones from an old man to give to the security guard, to keep him on the company’s side instead of the protester’s. He takes the sad employee out to get laid and sleeps with one intern “so his buddy can get with the other one.” He gives a job to a troubled kid only to use his streetwise connections nefariously later. All the while portraying himself as a benevolent father figure, as most dictators do, Blanco moves his employees around like pawns, putting out fires that create others elsewhere – these power moves eventually come back to bite him.

Fernando León de Aranoa’s Oscar-selected film, like the company, could afford to cut the fat a little bit. It drags in the middle, which blurs the punch, but does make for some comedic repetition in scenarios that are returned to, like the poetic security guard and brash protester workshopping assonant rhyme schemes for the protest signs together, or the symbol of the literal scales at the front of the company gates being unbalanced.

But for all its dry wit, The Good Boss is ultimately a portrait of a megalomaniac. Showcasing the dramatic lengths he’s willing to go to in order to maintain control (what he sees as equilibrium) in his little kingdom, it leaves a sour taste. One of Blanco’s poor employee-pawns finally helps him rebalance the scales of the company while beating him at his own game, which cleanly ties up the “justice is blind” theme – though Blanco still gets what he wants in the end. It’s a satisfying parable of the inherent rottenness of capitalist greed: As Blanco says, “Sometimes you have to trick the scale to get the exact weight.”