George Clooney's Best Performance, Academy-Caliber, About the Heartlessness of Corporate America--the Innocents Who Get the Ax Deserve Honorable Mention

Rating: 10/10 (6 December 2009)

Ryan Bingham is happiest when he's traveling, either when he's at an airport contemplating his next flight, aboard a plane where he can meditate on the world from 30,000 feet, or flopping on the bed of a hotel room where he's treated like royalty. On the road, Ryan Bingham is somebody, a VIP customer who has racked up more flying miles than the equivalent of several trips to the moon. He gets the best hotel rooms, he cuts through long lines, and he can jump into rental cars faster than a speeding bullet without having his life-story entered into a computer terminal. He is one of thousands of frequent-flyer business travelers to whom hotels and rental car companies genuflect; they kiss his ring by offering the best rates, the best rooms, and loads of freebies. His one-bedroom apartment even resembles an hotel room, although from the get-go, we learn he doesn't like being at home. The road is his home and the people at American Airlines are his family. And occasionally he meets a similar bird-of-a-feather, a business traveler of the opposite sex, for a quick fling.
He has an unusual job: to fly to certain corporate American locales and lower the proverbial lay-off ax onto the necks of unsuspecting employees because the company doesn't have the guts to do it themselves. In an age of outsourcing, it shouldn't be surprising that even the dirty job of laying people off can and has been outsourced. Ryan Bingham is the ax men of ax men, firing hundreds of people at a single bound for a plethora of American companies. His own company has come up with a pamphlet that is supposed to ease the blow and convince the poor victim that this is the beginning of a new life. Bingham does his job well (but of course he knows the stupid pamphlet is meaningless), and the upside is he doesn't have to be at home. He does the dirty deed like an assassin-for-hire before heading back to the airport and beginning the cycle all over again. And in between these hits, other companies engage him as a motivational speaker where he likens people and possessions to luggage that drags you down. Of course he advocates traveling light, and not just in terms of what he takes on his business trips.
But then his neat and tidy world comes under threat when a new upstart less than half his age, Natalie Keener played by Anna Kendrick, propagates a more efficient way of doing the dirty work. Instead of paying for all those planes and hotels, the company could simply do the job from a virtual terminal back at the corporate office. Firing can now be done with the efficiency of a skype network video-conference style. The ax can be wielded in a setting that wouldn't be much different from ordering something through a Sears online catalog with a live agent on-screen. Complete virtual outsourcing. (You wonder if their next step would be to outsource the outsourcing to India!) The proposal however would mean no more frequent-flyer miles for Bingham. To add insult to injury, his company instructs Bingham to take the young upstart crow through the process. Now we have two reluctant bedfellows, as it were, traveling all over corporate America.
This was a pleasant surprise of a movie, maybe not for all tastes, but an incredible storyline with an absolutely tour-de-force performance by Clooney who moves from his usual Steve McQueen cool and eventually shows a more vulnerable side. Simultaneously, I wish there existed an Academy Award for honorable mention. One of the best aspects of the film were a few dozen short clips of the people being fired. According to an interview with Terri Gross, the filmmaker Jason Reitman used people who were not actors, but whose only prerequisite to being in the film was that they had recently lost their jobs. They were instructed to remember how they felt when they were fired and react impromptu on camera, something you don't see very often in films outside of reality television. Also high marks for Reitman who finds the appropriate tone and atmosphere for his story. I hope Clooney is nominated for best actor, but I also wish some of the people "receiving the ax" could be honored as well. These were not performances exactly but reenactments.