Difficult to categorize; easy to admire

Rating: Null/10 (18 February 2010)

This is not an easy film to categorize - which is a good thing. It's a kind of road movie, except that all the travelling is in the air as Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) aims to hit a personal (and meaningless) target of 10 million air miles. It's a sort of rom-com with Bingham meeting Alex (Vera Farmiga), his match as a hard-nosed executive who likes some fun on the side. There's an odd-couple theme as Bingham is teamed up with Natalie (Anna Kendrick), the very young newcomer to the corporate world who tries to outdo her companion in coldness. And the whole thing is a satire on the brutality of capitalist enterprise that sacks hard-working and long-serving staff with a management-speak that makes it sound as if the company is doing them a favour.
Whichever way you look at it, this is Clooney's film. He is rarely off the screen and gives a marvellously assured and textured performance as the mobile downsizer or "career transition counsellor" who at a personal level does not want to be burdened by anything or anybody (shades of Clooney's own reluctance to commit to a relationship). Credit must also go to young director (and co-writer) Jason Reitman, hot from his success with "Juno". If the film has an episodic narrative, this is clearly because it is based on a novel by Walter Kim with chapters based on Bingham's visit to different airports and different companies in various mid-western towns.
The economic context to the movie feels very contemporary since the release comes at a time of high unemployment in the United States (as elsewhere) as a result of the worst recession since 1929; yet the novel was published in 2001 and Reitman began work on a screenplay in 2002. An interesting touch is that almost all the people fired in the movie were real-life workers who had recently lost their jobs in St Louis and Detroit and were asked to say what they felt about the experience