In Good Company lacks both the emotional sting and the bright pop-culture snap of About a Boy, as well as Hornby's carefully cultivated irony, but it makes for an agreeable solo-directing debut. Weitz has an easy commercial style that entertains without insult, and on the evidence of both this and his last film he has found a theme (masculinity and its complaints) that fits him like a glove.
If the screenplay veers toward the overly schematic, with Dan and Carter's lifelines forming geometrically calibrated parallel tracks, Weitz makes certain that the precise architecture of the story neither imprisons his characters nor dampens his sense of play. I don't believe for a single second how Weitz ends his fairy tale, but I mean it as a compliment to say that I wish I did.
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