With corporate layoffs in the news, it may be fitting to revisit the 2009 film Up in the Air, which is currently streaming on Netflix and elsewhere.

First, a word about Netflix in the context of the more recent trend toward so-called original content.

If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you may find yourself spending more time scrolling through the offerings rather than actually watching something.

When you exclude all of the virtue-signaling, ideologically driven fare as well as dreary yarns about serial killers, there is hardly anything to choose from.

As alluded to above, Netflix relatively recently changed direction from a movie/TV library to a content acquirer or producer (necessitated by studios creating their own streaming channels rather than continuing to license content).

To put it mildly, the results have been underwhelming in terms of quality.

Breitbart News senior writer John Nolte summed it up:

[W]henever I go to Netflix to see what’s on, it’s a $5 billion pile of woke and mediocrity. Sure, there are exceptions…but it’s absolutely stunning to me that one outlet can produce so many terrible movies and TV shows. The run of Expensive Awful at Netflix is mind-bending. 

Perhaps for that reason, Netflix lost nearly one million subscribers in 2Q 2022. Netflix says it gained 2.4 million subscribers in 3Q, but just a paltry 100,000 in U.S. and Canada. North American customers appear to be voting with their remote.

It’s worth mentioning that so-called entertainment offered by the legacy alphabet networks (with overlap on their streaming services) is also lame, at least based on promotional commercials aired during NFL games.

Anyway, getting back to Up in the Air, produced, in part, by DreamWorks and distributed by Paramount Pictures…

The overrated film with admittedly some thought-provoking dialogue, plus a fair amount of product placement, received nominations for a slew of awards, and winning a Golden Globe for best screenplay for a script written by director Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner.

Spoilers Follow

A typecast George Clooney portrays a smug, smooth-talking perpetual traveler working for a HR consultancy who — instead of the employer clients — flies around the country firing or laying off workers.

In other words, he does the employers’ dirty work. And home is the road.

As a side note, even outside of an economic downturn, business entities unfortunately often treat conscientious employees like disposable parts.

Clooney’s character glibly tells one man in the separation interview that “Anyone who ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you’re sitting right now.”

That can be true, but it’s not always true, even when somebody puts maximum effort in going out on their own in a new venture.

Ryan Bingham (the Clooney character), however, revels in the perks provided by his “elite status,” such as express check-in everywhere, and the like, while seemingly distancing himself from his job as a corporate hatchet-man.

He also prides himself on an entanglement-free way of life, a philosophy which he has leveraged into a side hustle as a “what’s in your backpack?” motivational speaker.

The suavely superficial Bingham’s ultimate goal is to amass ten million frequent flyer miles (one million in the book authored by Walter Kirn upon which the film is loosely based).

New hire Natalie Keener, a recent Ivy League college graduate, arrives on the scene, who, according to the plot, is only person in Bingham’s company to figure out that that it would be more cost-effective to terminate a client’s employees via teleconference (this before the advent of Zoom).

Seeing that his lifestyle is at risk, Bingham strikes a deal with the boss to bring the inexperienced Keener (Anna Kendrick) on the road to see what the interpersonal process is really like. Parenthetically, the filming presumably concluded before business casual attire became more commonplace.

The movie has an interesting premise, but with its heavy-handed messaging, it quickly descends into soap opera.

It hardly would be, of course, the first movie that diminished the source material in this manner.

Various characters in the movie call out Bingham for the meaningless, empty nature of his existence without a committed relationship and a family. This is a profound message to be sure and eventually has an impact on him.

The redundancy or relentlessness of the motif (which even renders inconsequential, if not incongruent, the snippets of real people revealing their feelings upon their previous fired), however, poses the difficulty with the story line.

In that way, Up in the Air has a rough, unconvincing landing.

As the movie continues, Bingham commences what starts out as a casual affair with another incessant business traveler named Alex Goran (Vera Farmigia).

As Wikipedia explains, Bingham then “begins questioning his lifestyle and philosophies.”

He impulsively walks out of a speaking engagement — this only happens in the movies –and flies to Chicago to see Alex, with whom he has apparently fallen in love . (Even notice that Hollywood tends to give female characters male names?)

In a twist that some viewers may have seem coming, the self-satisfied downsizer gets his comeuppance.

Standing at Alex’s front door, Bingham learns that she is married with children, thus destroying his dream for a deeper relationship with the woman. What he thought was a thing sadly turns out to be a fling.

At this point, Clooney, the would-be Cary Grant, actually does some real acting. Anyone who has seen a budding relationship, or hopes for same, go down in flames can relate.

“Having played God on the job for so many years, he’s come to think of himself as impenetrable to the lures of intimacy. But being played by Alex reveals a weakness he’s long suppressed: his own desire for companionship,” Curator Magazine noted.

Bingham’s boss, portrayed by Jason Bateman, subsequently decides to abandon the remote-layoff proposal. Back on the road, but now understandably chastened, however, Clooney’s character appears no longer enamored with the otherwise-disconnected lifestyle he had cherished.

The movie concludes with now-melancholy Ryan Bingham, on his way to another firing gig, looking up wistfully at the arrival-departure board. He’s perhaps remembering Natalie’s line earlier the film where she talked about the freedom of picking a destination at random.

Aside from hurt feelings, it’s unclear if he has actually realized anything about the dehumanizing nature of his career, however, as it relates to people who are about to become jobless.

Some companies outsource the HR function, but using intermediaries to tell workers to clean out their desk is another matter.

Back in 2010, for example one consultant told the San Francisco Chronicle that “To the extent it is portrayed in the movie, I’m not aware of companies that are hired to parachute in, deliver the message and escape out of Dodge.”

Other observations:

Absent extraordinary circumstances, who schedules a wedding in northern Wisconsin in February?

Why would have a test-run of a firing by video with the employee in the next room?

Could one company have enough firing business to send Bingham on the road for 322 days in a year?

Creativity-challenged Hollywood movies are typically loaded up with cliches. In what may or may not be a cliche that Up in the Air avoided, the Bingham character is not, in the end, fired by Natalie, which would have been a typical tables-turning development that you might have expected.