Fridae

I swear Jason Reitman has a thing for magnificent bastards. His breakout feature film had a protagonist who takes pride in his job as a tobacco lobbyist, and does his job far better than anyone else could. This time round, Reitman’s modern anti-hero (played by George Clooney) is a professional, a convenient assassin whom bosses outsource when they want to fire their employees but don’t have the guts or courtesy of doing the job themselves.

Ryan Bingham is practically a misanthropic loner who shuns relationships, lives out of a suitcase 320 days of a year, and gives motivational talks about how liberating it is not to be tied down by friends, family, and sentimentality – but he’s still a magnificent bastard for how he does his job with élan, and how affable he still comes across despite being a bastard (or maybe it’s just George Clooney’s charms working). It probably helps with his chosen profession, I guess.

If the set-up isn’t fun enough, the fun really begins when Bingham acquires an understudy (against his will), a love interest (against his own policy on casual relationships), and reconnects with his family (very much with reluctance and regret) on his latest road trip and bloody massacre of working adults across America.

Part of the fun is watching Bingham espouse his life philosophy in funny, scathing and cynical terms in the first act of the movie, and his equally funny, scathing and cynical reactions to the mayhem that results to these life changes in the second act. The other part of the fun lies in watching Clooney’s co-stars Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick as the love interest (or soul mate with benefits might be a better term) and buddy/foil respectively.

Reitman’s scriptwriting is sophisticated and urbane in depicting very grown-up and sensible depictions of adult relationships and friendships without the mushy sentimentality, conservative moralising, and third act spiritual reformations that mar lesser efforts. His handling of the unemployment epidemic and recession in America is dispassionate enough to mine the depths of dark comedy, and I suspect this same quality is key to his darkly comic vision of a romantic comedy.

As a character study, social satire, or even a commentary about modern life, Reitman’s screenplay and the fine performances by the principal actors make this a film that deserves to win more Oscars than it probably will.