Los Angels, Oct. 25: “Want to go the movies?” Tommy Lee Jones poses the question to Chris Cooper in The Company Men, a social drama from the writer and director John Wells that is set for release in December by the Weinstein Company.

The question comes at what students of Hollywood story architecture will recognise as the bottom of the second act. That’s when things (seemingly) can’t get worse.

Mr Jones, as the fictional Gene McClary, and Mr Cooper, as his longtime right-hand man, Phil Woodward, are a couple of suddenly unemployed shipbuilding executives who have been drinking, philandering and otherwise acting out their rage and confusion at having lost jobs in the current economic troubles.

They’re too old to get new jobs, and too proud to stop trying. Along with Ben Affleck, who plays Bobby Walker, a sidelined fellow executive from a rapidly downsizing conglomerate, the company men — McClary and Woodward — are trying to jump-start new lives, while kicking some life into America’s dreary economy.

And catching a movie, as Mr Jones suggests at that low point, might not be a bad idea — for any of us.

Historically, the movies have helped get the country in gear when the solution to a crisis depends at least in part on new resolve and a boost to the spirits.

“We’re in the money!” Hollywood told us, with a wink, in Gold Diggers of 1933, one of many films to tackle the Great Depression head-on. Come World War II, the film industry signed up with inspirational dramas like “Casablanca” and “Mrs Miniver.”

In 1984, when a wave of farm foreclosures weighed on the national psyche, no fewer than three studio films — The River from Universal Pictures, Places in the Heart from TriStar and Country from Touchstone — rallied support that merged with a music-driven Farm Aid campaign and culminated in the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987.

But the bewildering journey through a subprime lending crisis, a market collapse and federal bailouts, added to the lingering pain of chronic joblessness, appears to have left filmmakers at something of a loss.

They have been quick enough to spot Wall Street gone awry. This year, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, directed by Oliver Stone, and a pair of documentaries, Inside Job, directed by Charles Ferguson, and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, directed by Alex Gibney, all chronicle in one way or another the sins of a financial industry that lost its moorings. But the movies have offered little in the way of solace for Main Street, which has been in considerable pain since 2007.

The 2009 Paramount Pictures film Up in the Air, of which Jason Reitman was the director and a writer, took a jab at unemployment.
But the cold brilliance of its lead character, the job-termination expert Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney, seemed to stun more than inspire the audience, which eventually gave the film a respectable $84 million in domestic ticket sales.

“There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” Mr Wells said in a recent interview, describing The Company Men and its underlying lesson. “There’s a resilience in the American character that the movie is trying to celebrate.”