Sugar-coated nastiness

Rating: 9/10 (22 December 2009)

Jason Reitman has brought to the screen a new zeitgeist class, for whom I confess a certain envy: those who live in airplanes, airports and hotels, who live everywhere and nowhere. Are these the new seafarers, the new range riders? Are they paladins or pirates? They seem unfettered, but are they truly free?
"We've hired this professional hit man to ruin your life, and if you don't like it, we'll call security." Companies are gangsters with lawyers instead of guns, severance packages instead of cement buckets. George Clooney is Ryan Bingham, gentleman job assassin, immaculately attired and groomed, professionally smiling, mouthing canned reassurances as he gently plunges the knife into his victims -- the Dilberts whose terminations he's been outsourced to announce. His young protégée, played by Anna Kendrick, is a true believer who has invented a new way of firing, via teleconference.
The cast is perfect, including scene-stealers Kendrick and Vera Fermiga as Alex Goran, Bingham's kindred spirit-in-the-air who deliver's him his comeuppance. Jason Bateman plays Bingham's amoral boss flawlessly. Reitman even casts some authentic terminees to play themselves. Other victims are played by professionals, who blend in perfectly, except for J.K. Simmons, who's impossible not to recognize, in a delicious bit.
This would be a perfect movie except for the episode of Bingham with his family. I think we're meant to loathe the life Bingham leads, yet "back home" we are met with lives as flat the cardboard cutouts of Bingham's sister and fiancé he schleps around to fulfill a feckless wedding assignment. There's an ambiguity here I'm not sure Reitman meant to introduce.
A word about George Clooney. He's this generation's Robert Redford. A little darker in his look, sound and roles, but the same in many ways. Do you remember Redford in his Twilight Zone episode, also playing a "transition specialist"? He could have been Ryan Bingham. I predict an Oscar nomination for Clooney, and possibly for Kendrick and Fermiga.