Guy Sez: I’d like to say this is a movie about San Francisco. There are several shots of San Francisco from the air, a few scenes in the airport and one of a female star explaining why she moved to Omaha:

San Francisco Manager: So, what happened?
Natalie Keener: How exactly do you mean?
San Francisco Manager: You graduated top of your class. You could have had your pick of employment, including right here. Instead, you went to Omaha to… fire people for a living?
Natalie Keener: Challenging work.
San Francisco Manager: I’ll say. I couldn’t imagine doing that day in and day out. Especially not in this climate.
Natalie Keener: I… followed a boy.
San Francisco Manager: I guess we’ve all done that at some point in our lives.

But no. It’s about America. Modern, impersonal, corporate America. The world of airport lounges and identical hotel rooms. The procedures of security and check-in. Loyalty cards and status.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is the opposite of a corporate headhunter. He’s a headkicker, firing employees of downsized corporations. He’s always on the move around the country, terminating people by batches in Dallas, Chicago, Kansas City, Tulsa…

His life is airline lounges and hotel chains, rental cars and living out of a carry-on bag. He lives for airmiles, platinum status, check-in speed and efficiency in travel, possessions and relationships. He’s also a motivational speaker, spreading his lean gospel:

Ryan: How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. Now, I want you to pack it with all the stuff you have in your life. You start with the little things: the shelves and drawers and nicknacks. Then you start adding larger stuff: clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… Your backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home. I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now, I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office. Then you move into the people that you trust with your most intimate secrets. Brothers, your sisters, your parents, your children. And finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack. Feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake, your relationships are the heaviest components of your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets and compromises. The slower we move, the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other, to live symbiotically over a lifetime: star-crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We. Are. Not. Swans. We’re sharks.

Ryan is a shark. He spears through the crowds of travellers with checked luggage, first class lanes reserved for him, lounges opening up with the wave of a card. He’s the dream of everyone who has ever languished in a line of shuffling coach passengers, dragging their checked luggage.

Ryan meets Alex (Vera Farmiga) in a hotel bar. She’s got a loyalty tag on a keyring, and before you can say HHonors, they are spreading out their cards, checking each other’s programs, drooling over status and airmile tallies. She’s got sixty thousand, domestic, but he’s got a lot more than that.

He’s joined the Mile High Club transatlantic. She’s done it on a regional hop.

He’s impressed, and in the blink of a camera they are searching for a closet. Next morning they examine their schedules, dates and airport codes spinning and dancing until a jackpot comes up and they can share a layover in a few weeks.

Ryan’s life in the air is interrupted by a summons to corporate headquarters in Omaha. We see him arriving at his tiny, spartan apartment, no personal possessions of any kind. It might as well be a hotel room. Next morning the road team is assembled to listen to a pitch from recently hired Cornell grad Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick). Ryan’s carefree sequence of flights and hotels and rental cars is under threat.

Ryan and Natalie are sent off for one last road trip, firing folk in a dozen cities. As an aside, every one of the terminated workers is actually a real and recently fired person. For the film, they were given the opportunity to say what they would like to have said at their exit interview. There are some very deep reactions on display.

In Miami, they encounter Alex once again, at a moment of personal trauma for Natalie. A night of carousing follows, with Ryan gradually coming to realize that his life, his career, his philosophy may not mean as much as he thought it did.

There’s more to the film, a lot more, but I’ll leave it for you. It’s good, and there’s no copout ending.

This is perhaps the perfect film for America after a year of deep downsizing. In any given audience there will be people nodding their heads, maybe crying if the wounds are recent.

Ryan’s boss: Retailers are down 20 percent. Auto industry is in the dump. Housing market doesn’t have a heartbeat. It is one of the worst times on record for America. This is our moment.

Terminated worker: On the stress level, I’ve heard that losing your job is like a death in the family. But personally I feel more like the people I worked with were my family, and I died.

Ryan is good at his job. He instructs Natalie, who confidently relies on her “minor in pyschology”, and together they rise above the pain they are inflicting.

There’s sex in this film. And yes, she uses a body double. Ryan has no commitments, no partner, nothing but casual encounters with women on the road. Even his occasional neighbour in Omaha who delivers Ryan’s mail responds to his offer to get together with the news that she is seeing someone. Ryan just shrugs. It’s not important.

Ryan’s message to imagine your life as a backpack and to empty it of belongings and then set fire to it is a fantasy for the road warrior. His message to treat relationships the same way is not one that I would expect to resonate with too many people. Like, anyone with a heart.

Possessions can weigh you down. and yes, every now and then somebody loses everything they own in a fire or some other disaster – like being laid off. But relationships are the true gold. They weigh nothing in your mythical backpack, but they are everything in your life.

Ryan and his co-workers see their jobs as sugar-coating the inevitable. They have no control over or knowledge of why a worker is terminated – they never ever say “fired” – and their own jobs are just a list of names to cross off and a stack of glossy termination packages to hand out, each one listing the material benefits, severance pay, timings and conditions of downsizing.

But the workers being let go see the thing different. Their coworkers are their friends. Their job provides for their family. How do they translate Ryan’s slick lines into words they can use with their wife and children?

This is a film about airmiles and hotel chains and rental cars and casual sex. But it’s really about relationships. What do you really want out of life? A million airmiles and a graphite loyalty card? Or someone to hold you close and share your life. All of your life.
–Guy Sez

Comments:

No Flagship Lounge at DFW. Admirals Club one of my favorites, ate out, sharing icecreams with Grl at B&J, chicken and salad at TGIF. Quick beer in the club, skipped inflight meal, very nice shiraz. Grl hung out window admiring awesome desert and mountain view, I read Diary of a Sex Fiend. Pleasant flight. Good to be home!