Up in the Air
Review By: Gordon K. Smith
Ryan Bingham, is a “career transition counselor”, which is a nice way of saying he fires people for a living, as a hired gun for corporate bosses too cowardly to do it themselves. This job requires him to spend most of his time criss-crossing the country in first class or sucking up cocktails in airport VIP lounges. When he’s not doing that, he’s a motivational speaker with a carefully rehearsed speech about our personal backpacks, and how many of our belongings, tangible and abstract, we can keep in those backpacks, or do without, to keep our lives simple, to keep ourselves up in the air, so to speak.
Up in the Air is the multiple-meaning title of director Jason Reitman’s new “dramedy”, one of the best films of 2009. This is the followup to Reitman’s surprise 2007 breakthrough Juno, although he wanted to make it as far back as 2002 as his entry into feature projects. Thank You For Smoking and Juno got green-lighted for Reitman first, and we are the better for the wait. Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel concerned itself with the oncoming recession of its day; the by-turns hilarious and stinging adaptation by Reitman and Sheldon Turner updates it eight years to our current employment crisis, with not only the now-tenfold urgency but the security and high-tech advancements as well.
One of the film’s many virtues is its bulls-eye casting. Has George Clooney ever fit a part better than he does the role of Bingham? His looks, swagger, and low-key delivery are the perfect tools for someone whose job it is to deliver devastating news to the unexpecting, and somehow convince them that they’ll be all the better for it. It’s Clooney’s best work to date. Also spot-on is Anna Kendrick as Natalie Keener, a young woman with a plan that threatens to ground Ryan’s literally jet-setting lifestyle: remove yourself even further from the dirty business by firing people over the internet via web-cams -- even if they’re in the next room. This character, not in Kirn’s book (which told from Bingham’s point of view), is a smart creation by Reitman and Turner -- she becomes Bingham’s external conscience, as he takes her along on his missions to show her why her plan lacks the personal touch.
A more predictable film would have contrived an unlikely romance between these two, but it’s a strictly business bonding - Ryan finds a kindred soul in Alex Goran, another frequent flyer with a yen for long-distance liaisons and massive air mile accumulation (Ryan’s goal in life is to hit the magic number of 10 million). Vera Farmiga gives another of the film’s beautifully modulated performances as Alex; it’s a rare American film now that gives you not one but two female characters this memorable.
Reitman, son of comedy vet Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), shows a remarkable ear for dialog and gift for directing ensemble casts for his 32 years and only three films. His brilliant stroke in verisimilitude is hiring non-actors who have actually experienced ambush layoffs to recreate that experience on camera for this film, with the added ability to inject any comments they didn’t get to express the first time. As someone who’s been through one of those ambushes myself, the deja vu cuts like a scalpel (but I must question one thing in this script -- “fired” is used to mean “laid off”, and anyone who’s been through either, on either side of the desk, knows they aren’t the same thing).
The tone of Up In The Air evolves in the third act -- the laughs are still there, but so are some bitter reality checks, as Bingham learns from these two women and his distant (in both senses) family the cost of his lifestyle and his job on the soul, that of his “clients” and his own. We’re left with a picture of man now in bad need of a taste of his own medicine, in this very well-made movie that stays flying around in your head longer than you’d expect.
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