No Man Is An Airline.

Rating: 8/10 (28 September 2010)

Some criticism has been made of this film, I notice. It's not worth an Academy Award. There's too much product placement -- Hertz, American Airlines, Hilton Hotels. I can understand that point and can add more. It's not exactly plot driven either. There's a good deal of character dissection and little in the way of action, unless you count flying as action. On top of that, the musical score is execrable -- a warm and fuzzy folk guitar playing pretty tunes with lyrics like, "There's an ocean of water under your feet...." If you've heard Simon and Garfunkel's "Scarborough Fair," you'll know what I mean.
The one criticism I thought thoroughly unjustified was that the ending was predictable. It caught me by pleasant surprise.
George Clooney is a well-paid bureaucrat whose job is to fly around and fire executives. At any rate, I guess they can be called "executives." Many seem no more than mid-level and the only salary mentioned is by one firee, who admits to making $90,000. That doesn't seem like very much, does it? But wait. Let me get my calculator. Yes. That works out to 4.86 times as much as I ever made in my life. Okay. As far as I'm concerned, he's an "executive." So in this sense the movie is --
Hold on. Is that the MOST I ever MADE? What the hell happened? I've always wondered where it all went, and now I know. It was never there in the first place.
Where was I? Right. We follow George Clooney around and watch him do his job, which sociologists call "cooling out the mark." If you're going to fire somebody, you don't want him suing the company or jumping across the desk and strangling you.
Clooney is cool, but he's joined by a newbie fresh out of Cornell, which happens to have a fine school of Industrial and Labor Relations. The ambitious neophyte is played by Anna Kendrick who is just plain marvelous. Evidently she was born in Portland, Maine, but sounds like a Valley Girl. The velocity of her speech is like unto that of light. It comes in staccato bursts. And there is one scene in which she is hurrying after Clooney through an airport, demanding to know why he doesn't believe in love and commitments and he keeps parrying her increasingly earnest queries with common-sensical ripostes -- there's no such thing as love, it's all pointless. Then she stops suddenly. Clooney gapes at her as her features screw up into a grimace and she squeals, "Brian LEFT me!" Clooney's face drops and he moans, "Oh, ****." The way I look at it, if a movie has even one scene that can make me laugh out loud, it may or may not be Academy Award material (who cares?) but it can't be all bad.
Clooney seems satisfied with his job. He doesn't mind firing people. He gets to tell them about the bright new future ahead of them. He doesn't ENJOY it. He's just good at it and his company keeps him busy.
Then he runs into the sensuous Vera Farmiga. She travels around all the time too. They begin an on-and-off affair. It's on whenever they happen to cross paths at an airport. When Clooney is pulled by circumstance into a family ritual back in Wisconsin -- a marriage -- he asks Farmiga to come along as his date. She does, and they seem to have a great time together, although he knows nothing about her. The warm and fuzzy guitarist croons in the background, always a bad sign.
On his trips, firing folks and giving motivational speeches, he begins to contrast the life he's leading with the kind of love that Anna Kendrick has experienced. His mind turns to Vera Farmiga, to family and children. So he's launching into a motivational speech at some businessman's gathering and he stammers and hesitates, and I'm thinking, Oh My God, we've got St. Paul and an epiphany on the road to Damascus. Sure enough, Clooney excuses himself and leaves the podium. He hurries to Farmiga's house for an impromptu visit and I'll leave it at that. Except that, when they didn't fall into each others' arms, I wept with gratitude.
As I said, I don't care if the movie wins any awards or not. And the pace is a little andante in parts. But then it's largely a story of character rather than plot, and the weaknesses are more than compensated for by the trust that the writers, the director, and the performers have placed in the audience. It's a movie for grown ups and that's distinctive enough these days.