some people just work better alone

Rating: 7/10 (16 December 2019)

Ryan Bingham is a middle-aged man who fires people for a living. He works for a company that corporations hire to perform mass layoffs, a soul sucking task that managers often prefer to offload to third parties both because it's easier and for legal and workplace safety reasons. The movie takes place in 2009 during the economic aftermath of the 'Great Recession', a boom time for his industry.
If you've ever had the misfortune to live through one of these layoff events, you'd recognize that the movie gets a lot of the details correct. The carefully orchestrated image of calm professionalism, the coolly empathetic attitude calibrated to make it clear that they understand what individuals are going through while still making it clear that it isn't a negotiation or debate, the standard scripts dictating the flow of the conversation and acceptable euphemisms, the absurd insistence that they will assist you in "transitioning". You get the idea.
It would, frankly, be extremely easy to make you hate the people who do this for a living. Performing that kind of work requires people with muted empathy; they can't afford to care too much about the people they fire or the emotional weight would crush them. As the characters allude to in conversations amongst themselves, getting fired is, emotionally, akin to a death in the family. It's serious trauma, and they simply can't afford to feel it.
Which makes portraying Ryan, a man uniquely suited to his job, a difficult task, even for someone with as much charisma as George Clooney. Ryan prefers a life without the burdens of things and people; he even gives seminars that extol the virtues of caring about only what you can carry in a backpack. He views the road as his home and despises returning to his apartment even for forty days a year. His preference is for the sanitized comfort of the corporate world: hotel rooms, airline and car rental loyalty clubs, credit cards and points. All of his life goals and ambitions are built around those things.
Ryan's comfortable world is turned upside down when his employer hires a young ingénue named Natalie Keener who has proposed making the industry more efficient by doing their work via video conferencing instead of in-person. Thinking of the money to be saved, Ryan's boss insists Natalie's vision is the future of the business, but Ryan convinces him to at least have her accompany him to several job sites so she can get a feel for how the process works in real life. Along the way, Natalie's infectious humanity gradually begins to make Ryan question some of the rules by which he leads his life.
What's particularly interesting about the movie are the ways in which it subverts expectations. Traditional storytelling would suggest that a man who neither wants nor needs deep human connections and enjoys his job firing people should be shown the error of his ways, ala 'A Christmas Carol'. But Ryan is actually very good at his job, to the point where others routinely steal his lines and approaches. He's good at reading people and knowing when they need to re-contextualize what's happening to them, when they need to just vent, and when they need to have their shattered egos rebuilt. And his lack of human connection isn't complete; we see eventually that he does in fact care about others in meaningful ways. He just prefers to do it from a distance.
Which isn't to say that there aren't tragic aspects to Ryan's character, as detailed beautifully when he achieves a long-standing goal of his and is asked during a celebration in his honor where he's from. But the sense isn't that he's a tragic figure so much as a new type of creature uniquely adapted to an environment most of us would see as inhospitable. We see him and shiver at the thought of his life, but also come to realize that he would do the same thinking of ours.
The movie ends on this note, almost abruptly. Ryan has visited humanity and observed their ways, even tried living as one of them, but ultimately found their world confusing and distressing, and returns to his natural habitat. Though he bears us no ill will, we will not see him again save for the occasional postcard and by the taillight of his home in the night sky.