Mayday! Mayday! Alpha Male Down!

Rating: 8/10 (31 March 2010)

This is a very good movie.
George Clooney plays the opposite of a headhunter, named Ryan. He goes around firing people and is quite good at it. Being Clooney, he is handsome, centered, confident, and happy. He spends 250 days a year on the road and loves the isolation and is engaging in a quest for 10,000,000 air miles, which would make him the seventh person on the planet to do. "There have been more men on the Moon," he exults.
However, all is not well in Clooneyworld. For readers of Syd Field, this would be called Arc of Transformation. For people who don't need to spend $100K on film school, we call it emasculation.
First, Ryan is going to be taken off the road thanks to a precocious Cornell gamine named Natalie, who comes up with the bold proposal of using IT lines to fire people from cubicles. Ryan is aghast, and probably worried about the potential for losing his air-miles dream, and manages to take Natalie on the road so she can learn, in film parlance, a Valuable Lesson: firing is a most personal pas de deux and cannot be accomplished via the Web. This is contrary to Clooney's political views as Ryan's carbon footprint must be equivalent to the methane production of India.
Ryan meets Alex, who is the female version of Ryan. She tells him to "think of me as you, but with a vagina". And he engages in coitus with her and all is well.
Or is it?
The Pussification of Ryan really begins when he schtups Alex and begins to fall a little for her. When Natalie meets her and Ryan trumps up a good time for them, Natalie deals with her psychic pain by getting drunk and having casual sex. Meanwhile, Ryan is falling more and more for the Alpha Female Alex.
He makes the catastrophic error of attending his sister's wedding when guilt-tripped by a shrew of a sister who says he is needed. Then, to compound the error, he brings Alex. He manages to salvage the wedding when the groom gets cold feet. He is all over Alex and, of course, in the calm, mid-Western setting of northern Wisconsin, realized that all along he wants someone to come home to. And this someone is Alex.
He returns to his empty apartment and realizes, "Dang it, I love the Alex and I want to throw away my perfectly happy life to do it." This is a well-composed scene and reminds me of the time Rock Hudson exclaims in Pillow Talk, "Why does a man ruin himself? Because he thinks he's gonna get married."
MAJOR SPOILER (for those of you with an IQ below 80):
He flies to Chicago to sweep Alex off her feet and propose a lifetime of Alpha Dog lovin' only to discover... gasp! she is married and has a family.
Clooney's acting here is excellent. He does puppy-dog eyes as well as that cat in Shrek 2. And director Reitman goes so far as to rip-off Magritte in the following scene at the airport, sans bowler.
Now completely emasculated and probably reading I'm OK, You're OK, thankfully he does not cry, he further sabotages his life when he walks off the stage during a paid lecture, crippling his earning potential. I'd imagine the sequel will be about his trying to gentrify a barn and making it a shelter for abandoned pot-bellied pigs.
And just to make sure his manhood is stored somewhere in a vault at Brown University, he reaches his 10,000,000th mile and does not enjoy it, even when Sam Elliot (SAM ELLIOT, people!) sits down for a chat with him. Is there anyone more avuncular? Anyone who is less difficult with whom to engage in conversation? But, no, Ryan is just too doggone Alan Alda'd to enjoy his victory.
Considering how Clooneyites despise traditional marriage except as it applies to alternative lifestyles, you'd think that the movie would praise Clooney's isolationist choice. But no, he was too Alpha Male and had to be put down.
The movie itself is well-written, acted, and directed. Notice the little things: how the cities are introduced with aerial shots. Notice how Natalie is disgusted with her job in the scene where she has to tackle a list of firings. The scene is done without dialogue. Reitman, for such a young whippersnapper, has a good grasp on the mechanics of cinema. There are many scenes where character is revealed visually. Clooney letting go of his suitcase in the airport when he realizes he wants the hand, awwww, of Alex. And the life-on-the-road is well-presented.
I remember Anna Kendrick in a little hoot of a movie called Camp. She played an Eve Harrington-type which is repeated and then spun upon its head here. Clooney is always good and, despite the role he took here, probably one of a handful of real men left in Hollywood who is a star (Tom Cruise, c'mon). I don't know who this Vera Farmiga is, but this kid's got a future. She has acted in movies I have seen, but I never noticed her. Sorry, Vera. Take solace in your Oscar nomination (Oscar is a trademark of the AMPAS).
This is a very well-done film and I enjoyed it immensely even as I was covering my eyes watching a perfectly good man get crushed again by the adoption of sentiment.
Just once, once, can't he just stay happy and the world around him is at fault?