Every time you buy a ticket...

Rating: 10/10 (5 December 2009)

you hope it's going to be a movie as good as this one.
Jason Reitman puts together a superb cast, a polished production crew and some terrific writing, cannily, with a film premiering at a time when 10% of the American workforce is without a job. It's a movie about a "terminator," a man who is employed for difficult situations when someone needs to be fired. It's a lucrative profession, and Ryan Bingham (another sensational performance by George Clooney) loves his work. Not only does it afford him a life in travel, but he has the notion that he cares for the people he's employed to fire, letting them down easy so they don't gopostal.
While the performances are perfection, it's the screenplay that shines. Without apology, it meanders over and through (deeply in some cases) many aspects of modern life, scoring bulls-eyes each time. One part of the film is a romantic comedy, another a treatise on how to tolerate a difficult coworker, but it all adds up to the toll that modern life has taken on our emotional lives, effectively neutering all feeling and interpersonal joy for the good of the "the company." And as soon as you become irrelevant, you're tossed out and left with a packet of instructions on how to put your life back together againon your own, someplace else.
While the audience may be ahead of the script in some instances, how it's all played is just off center enough that every twist is enjoyable. Clooney gets amazing support from Vera Farmiga, a seductress who makes you believe you're doing the seducing, and Anna Kendrick as a thick-headed youngster who we watch both learn a few things about living as well as teaching her elders about what is really valuable at the end of a workday. Kenkrick's role is the trickiest and she pulls it off with a kind of daffy dignity that gives the movie its charm.
This should dominate the award season.