Given how all-out sinister Javier Bardem has been in a few of his best-known roles – the cruel killer in No Nation For Outdated Males, 007’s suave nemesis in Skyfall – you may’t simply think about him being avuncular. But that’s altogether what he’s in new Spanish characteristic The Good Boss – though his character is as sinister as uncle figures get.
On this black comedy by Fernando León de Aranoa, Bardem, benign-looking in informal jackets and jumpers, performs Blanco, proprietor of a manufacturing unit that makes scales. He’s first seen smilingly saying to his workers that the enterprise is up for a serious award, giving them an all-hands-on-deck pep speak and reminding them that he’s extra a pal than a boss. However the affable façade wears skinny when Blanco should cope with an government who’s coming undone on the seams and a lately sacked employee who decides to take the time-honoured Disgruntled Former Worker routine to new limits.
And naturally, this respectable household man additionally has a predatory eye on his new intern (Almudena Amor), who’s not practically the ingénue she seems. The Good Boss is a intelligent movie reasonably than a very trenchant one, the sly farce just a bit too calculated, the tempo at moments sluggish. However the movie has a particular class – not least, in some good visible variations on the theme of Blanco’s obsession with scales, steadiness and calibration.
Bardem is likely one of the few actors who might actually carry off this function: Blanco must be without delay loathsome, reassuring, cosy and but plausibly seductive – and the Spanish star fleshes him out with brio and a properly misleading middle-age joviality that implies that, on the subject of enjoying the flawed, middle-aged, middle-class Everyman, he presently has few display equals.
