If The Good Boss by Fernando León de Aranoa—originally titled El buen patrón—is a workplace comedy, it's a cruel and exhausting one. Beware of being duped by the movie's charming main actor or the frequently lighthearted soundtrack; the film's depressing conclusions are written into the very first scene. Boss Blanco, the blandly evil head honcho of a manufacturing company that makes industrial scales, is portrayed by Javier Bardem in top form. He musters a personality made solely of surdata-face elements and a continual desire for manufactured awards and extramarital sexual conquests. Bardem gives a pitch-perfect portrayal as excellent proletariat dartboard fodder in the dark comedy The Good Boss.
A hate crime that involves three MENA (Middle east and North African) adolescents smoking marijuana in a park at night before being approached by some tattooed, moped-riding miscreants opens the movie's workplace drama. After the assailants are taken into custody, Boss Blanco gives a snooze-inducing business speech from a cherry-picker to his manufacturing workers, whom he unironically refers to as his "children." Blanco wants to make sure that everything runs smoothly for the expected arrival of the award committee because the company has been nominated for an award for business achievement.
The Good Boss plays with lionising its main character in front of the audience in true black comedy form, giving them a shotgun seat through all of his setbacks and victories. When Miralles (Manolo Solo), a boyhood friend and shop captain, begins to have marital problems, Blanco's comforting presence and reassuring back rubs may appear to be the caring responses of a confidante. He is actually merely trying to maintain order in the factory as a pretext for receiving his impending award, which will be displayed on a wall with many of his compatriots.
Finding a symbolic balance is difficult for the movie because nearly every element is as sterile and blatant as its cold colour scheme. The idea of the scales factory is exploited to the point where there is little more to explore. A wonderful moment in which Prokofiev's "Dance of the Knights" is offered as Blanco's own internal windy theme is exquisite, but also inert and conclusive. Even in a brief but deliberate image, Jose created Blanco's manufactured agitprop mock burial, which is combined with a burning cross. The symbolism is never absent from the screen; it is just not subtle.