Makes you think in unexpected ways

Rating: 10/10 (4 June 2011)

There are hundreds of other reviews that state the obvious and true aspects of the film including the insights into frequent flier business travel, the life of young and aging professionals, the emotions felt by people laid off and those worried about their job changing around them, and the fantastic acting in the film.
What I found interesting about the film were the hidden insights into the directors, writers, and actors thinking as well as subtle cultural cues that the audience laughed at but may not have thought about at a conscious level.
On the surface, the film is very leftist/Hollywood. Heartless corporate bosses can't fire their own workers so they hire an outside firm to do it for them. Haha! I googled the concept and couldn't find such a firm. In my own corporate experience, the heartless, gutless managers don't bother to pay someone like Ryan to fly in business class to layoff the workers. They simply take the day off and have their HR representatives do it. I unfortunately know this from personal experience. That's part of why I enjoyed the film.
What was worth the price of admission was the dialogue between Ryan and the two generations of professional career women at a hotel lobby. All three of them are unapologetic selfish human beings. Ryan fires people for a living because it provides him with the lifestyle to run up frequent flier miles. This character also has a lot to do with Clooney's Hollywood alter ego. But the other two characters hit closer to home to the audience even if they didn't catch it. The young woman expressed post-feminist angst that while she loved earning lots of money and being able to pursue her career dreams, she worried about being able to land the perfect man. The older, attractive, and successful professional woman represented what the younger woman aspired to have (and in more ways than one, but I won't reveal how) but the older woman was more savvy about setting the "have-it-all" expectations of the younger woman more, down to earth.
So here the film features people getting laid off amid a bunch of professional bourgeois jetsetting around with their own selfish, shallow problems by comparison and they just don't "get it" that they're part of the problem. It's a nice allegory for the writers of the film and even many of the viewers.
When the film comes to an end, it doesn't leave the viewer's emotions all wrapped up in a neat bow but rather hanging where you don't know where the three characters' lives are leading. Indeed, the more successful, stable characters of the film are the ones who seem to have the most uncertainty.
Many of the best one liners are also the most politically incorrect and totally not the kind of thing that George Clooney would say at an Oscars presentation but probably the kind of things he thinks in his daily life. The scene where he lectures the girl at the airport at how to "save time" especially comes to mind. So much for him protecting minorities from sitting in the back of the theater! In the end, we're all "up in the air", whether we know it or not, with the biggest baggage not being our relationships, at least with each other, but rather with our expectations of the world and our cherished beliefs.