Around a year ago, a well-known Irish recruitment agency began advertising its latest service – how to offload staff in an effective and legally acceptable manner. Now, they put it in a much nicer way than that, of course. However, the subtext was only too clear. In a similar manner, lawyers and accountants make a fortune putting big deals together and then are able to make even more money when those deals go sour a few years later on. In other words, capitalism has proven to be a highly resilient beast for one very good reason. It will always have its acolytes who do not vacillate about the morality of how they make their money.
Therefore, if Daniel Plainview and Gordon Gekko represent the unashamedly greedy faces of capitalism, then Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) aspires to being its perfectly perfunctory one instead. Indeed, this polished business executive is the ideal instrument of his trade – an unemotional, smooth, and assertive loner who is in absolute thrall to the perks of his job and who can also relish what many would consider to be its spirit-crushing lows. In other words, Bingham can happily spend his days informing people that they are being made redundant and his evenings in the blessed anonymity of airports, airplanes, and hotels. His only problem in life is the forty-odd days of the year that he has to spend back home in his depersonalised apartment in Omaha. That said, a psychiatrist might also like to chat to him about his highly questionable philosophy on life…
Now, on paper, there was the potential here for this to be an interesting examination of the sort of person prepared to do a job that demands great personal sacrifices. Equally, this film from director and co-writer Jason Reitman does begin in promising enough fashion. One can even be tolerant of the fact that it turns some people’s reactions to the trauma of being made redundant into light comedy sketches…
More troubling, though, are moments such as when a person gets ignored when she has just calmly expressed her intention to kill herself or when the likes of Bingham can get away with dishing out ridiculous advice to people who have just been made redundant about how the world is now their oyster again and how this can be a moment of “rebirth” for them. As Bingham himself admits, not only will he never meet these people again, he is definitely not going to be following up on what becomes of them either. He has a quick and dirty job to do and, once it is done, he washes his hands of it.
Nevertheless, this film is able to dedicate plenty of time to examining the emotional impact that such encounters have on the people who are showing these employees the door. Hence, a middle-aged man can wander off a lonely, broken, and sobbing figure, whilst Bingham instead busies himself with making sure that his young colleague (Anna Kendrick) is okay following her “ordeal”. Indeed, it is testimony to her compassion for others that she does require several seconds afterwards to regain her composure before crossing the man’s name off of her list! In taking this approach, the film thus reduces the many ordinary victims of this recession down to being little more than bells and whistles on just another stylish yet cock-eyed Hollywood romantic comedy with a good-looking cast and an unconventional lead character.
For sure, Mr. Clooney is both charismatic and convincing as Bingham. On the other hand, a one-note performance is all that is demanded of him. Indeed, this entire offering comes across as being a glossy mediocrity of a film – something that is really just a couple of notches better than the usual insipid fare that this genre has to offer. It also trumpets no-brainer lessons in life, whilst saying nothing about how unfettered capitalism has destroyed the lives of so many ordinary Americans…
Lightly entertaining, if you do not think too hard about it; something of a monstrosity when you do.
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