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This movie stars George Clooney, as Ryan Bingham, who is constantly flying to city for his job as a professional firer. He comes in as an outside consultant to handle the often difficult task of firing often long standing employees. The victims of this have the real people feel and most are not too pleased. Right off the bat, you can see where the movie is coming from in some ways, the people getting fired, have worked for many years, and a multiplex decision was involved in this. They had to decide in many different time frames and many different ways to continue their employment, and it involved many decisions that were adding up. Yet the employer stymies that long standing process with just one decision. Ryan as the representative of the company, is the intruder, who finalizes the forced exits. A question starts to form, is Ryan himself becoming too hard boiled from this and in his own personal life to get something going for himself in the romance department? Then another aspect of this is how the job becomes almost like someone’s house, and the firing is like a home invasion so of course people are going to want to protect their turf. As the plot develops, we are introduced to the character of Natalie, who is fresh out of an Ivy League school at the top of her class and now brings the idea of doing the firing for the Ryan’s firm by video conferencing rather than flying around to the companies personally. Ryan balks at this idea as it threatens his well developed career literally being up in the air most of the time. He then starts to bring her around to show his side of the story and see from his point of view that it is necessary to log the miles and do the job face to face in person. His personal goal is to log ten million miles in the air, and when he does this, which will be soon he will be only the 7th person on the planet to achieve this goal, less people than have walked on the moon. Like any employee, his approaching this goal involved many individual decisions to fly that have added up to this incredible number of miles logged in the air. The movie really depicts how goals are often a question of many decisions adding up to something and how that the metrics on that might be questionable and how that march might be suddenly interrupted by outside forces This is also symbolic, as the metrics that people use are questionable as well, both in companies that are hiring and firing and with personal goals. Then he meets his female counterpart, another business traveler named Alex played by Vera Farmiga, who is a combination tough and sultry. As the plot unravels we see the metaphor working in both directions, the job and relationships both have aspects where someone can get fired. One character in the film gets fired by text from her boyfriend. The relationship, involves like a job, often the decision to relocate and many small decisions that add in. The firing can interrupt. A good way to go into this film is to see how the relationship is being looked at parallel with the job and symbolism carries back and forth from each realm, one maybe affecting the other in its dynamics and approach. Something to ponder from this, is do people who get fired also become hesitant in forming relationships given that they also might get fired from a relationship suddenly after many types and degrees of effort towards it or vice versa, will the person who has been tossed out of several relationships seek work of a less permanent nature and look for consultant jobs that are more hit and run and don’t involve long term involvements such as the job that Ryan Bingham is doing in this movie?
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