Nothing more sinister than an undertaker

Rating: Null/10 (18 July 2011)

A very strange film that proposes no way out in the crisis situation which is part of everyday life in the USA: firing and getting fired. Today quite a few businesses have outsourced the processing of these firing procedures. So a business specialized in firing people comes into the picture to do it properly, to make limbos presentable and hell palatable, heaven-like if you want, with some nice words and a lot of mind manipulation.
These professional firers are plane people who can fly nearly 320 days a year and spend exactly 7 times 24 hours boarding planes in one year. They have very strict requirements about traveling light and traveling on light and flexible wheels. Home is airports all over the USA, some day all over the world. And they learn how to live with light sushi, and accepting or refusing a "cancer" when the stewardess proposes them "a can, sir".
They thus learn how to wrap up horror and death on a slow fire and so many other evils in the shiny suits of rebirth, a new beginning, an opportunity to excel in a new field of creativity. They forget the suffering they are going to create or even the death they are peddling day after day, be it jumping from a bridge, or slow poisoning on alcohol, or just triggering some fire arm.
But on the other side the younger ones out of Cornell University or some other high-rise higher education schools are just developing a new technique based on the Internet and communication tools and technologies to dehumanize firing by making direct contact, even be it only eye contact, impossible since two screens, two cameras, two mikes, two modems and a telephone line are between the firer and the firee. That's what they are told and taught in these deluxe schools that can wrap any crap in gold to make us think it is a nugget or a piece of chocolate.
But Clooney brings another dimension in his airport ever perambulating home: that is to say just not being alone. Of course in those terminals and in those planes you can always find some human contact, be it purely professional and paid for, or be it some person casually met in a bar or restaurant, or for the more deprived be it only a chambermaid, or as for that a chamber-"valet" or plain janitor. But he shows us how at one moment in this life the traveler will want some more permanent or regular contact and meeting. But that is nothing but an appearance meeting an appearance and hell it is for the one who believes this appearance, on this side or on the other side, is the real thing. Harder will the fall be, and harder is the fall.
A small film showing the total artificiality and somewhere absurdity of that civilization based on transience and mobility and rootless-ness and professional distance and non-empathy. Cruel but absurd. Samuel Beckett at its highest acme.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU