It's every middle-middle's nightmare, "middle-middle" meaning middle-aged middle manager: You walk into the office, learn of a corporate merger and find a 26-year-old hotshot nesting in your chair. Bad news: He's got your job. Good news, or at least what passes for such: He's looked over your work and thinks you'd make a great "wing man." Such is the setup for writer/ director Paul Weitz's "In Good Company," a probing comedy that deconstructs, attacks and even celebrates corporate greed, age discrimination and the art of the hard sell. The film spectacularly combines the bitter humor of "Dilbert" and "Office Space" with the seductive, go-go thrills of "Wall Street." All that, and the film still has time for quirky family happenings, simmering romance and the most heartbreaking pickup basketball scene you're ever likely to see. The young up-and-comer is Carter Duryea, played by Topher Grace of TV's "That '70s Show." A callow dynamo who tosses around buzzwords such as "synergy," he has impressed his Rupert Murdoch-like superconglomerate CEO enough to be promoted as the head of ad sales at the corporation's new flagship sports magazine. Carter's smugness and hyperactivity are only masks for a scared young man to hide behind. He's suffering from a crumbling marriage and a yawning void of unfulfillment. It doesn't help his ego that none of his employees respect him and make cruel wordplays on his last name. Booted out of the corner office is Dan Foreman (Dennis Quaid), a company lifer with a wife, two daughters and multiple financial crises coming up the pike. Dan grudgingly adapts to his demotion and accidentally invites the lonely Carter over for dinner. The evening leads to Carter further weirding up his relationship with Dan by falling for Foreman's NYU-bound daughter, Alex (Scarlett Johansson). The dynamic between Carter and Dan continually shifts and evolves, with Dan's fatherly, world-weary wisdom and demanding nature clashing with Carter's unseasoned, artificial-seeming authority. At different times Carter represents varied avatars for Dan: obnoxious, unqualified boss; sad-sack loner; sleazeball daughter-hawk; the son he never had. And it goes both ways. Dan and Carter are almost always at odds, sometimes violently so, and the film pulls off the clever trick of keeping both characters completely sympathetic, even when one, the other or both give in to their piggish and wrong-headed tendencies. Weitz uses measured parallelism to hint at the similarities between Dan and Carter, and tracks the course of each man with equal gusto. When they're not in the office, Weitz uses sly bridging techniques to transition from one story to the other, such as zooming in on one man swiping a credit card, then pulling back to reveal the other man doing the same thing in different places. The screenplay is a pulsing, full-bodied achievement for Weitz, who was nominated for an Oscar for penning "About a Boy" (2002) with his brother Chris Weitz and Peter Hedges. The characters are intricate and textured, and the dialogue courses with naturalistic honesty. The story's twists and turns are as wily and off-center as life itself. Whenever you think you have the film figured, it tosses in another confounding wrinkle, hurling everything into flux. Thanks to the confluence of impassioned acting, intelligent writing and steady direction, "In Good Company" is a simultaneously cheery and devastating office comedy. Now that's synergy.