tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

Starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick
Director: Jason Reitman
Release Date: December 23, 2009
Running Time: 109 mins.
MPAA Rating: R - for language and some sexual content
Distributor: Paramount Picture
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Airports have come to look like malls. These places seem to be irreverently trying to get you to forget that you are always on the go. Everyone seems to be going about in the same way, eating the same buffet, drinking the same drinks and thinking the same thoughts. When someone flies 350,000 miles in one year all of this becomes futile. You eat what you have to eat. Drink what you have been taught to drink. Inquiry becomes useless because this type of world is decentralized, harboring a sparsity of individualism and catering to a state of repetition. This is a post-modern way of living because there is no center for these frequent fliers, these business moguls. No wholeness in which they can construct their lives around. Without a lack of a solid foundation life can be formidable.

A generation in a tailspin is what Jason Reitman’s new film Up in the Air is after. It is a generation that is always fluctuating at a rapid and constant speed, not permanently or faithfully adhering to one particular thing. Instead, this generation (preferably the business men and women) is able to adapt to any city, person, cell phone, plane airliner, car service or hotel buffet. They’re used to things moving swiftly; moving through airport lines – due to their gold membership cards – and traveling ten million miles in the sky without a single hiccup. No time is dedicated to meeting their clients, which happen to be people who are getting fired or, in their business terminology, “getting let go.”

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is part of this group of people who move swiftly through life. He’s hired out by his business to other businesses around the country who are afraid to confront their clients with the news of “letting people go.” Nothing weighs Ryan down because he does not allow anything to do so. Being on the road three-hundred days a year can allow that to happen. He even does speaking engagements that inform people how to travel and what to put into their backpack. He loves the life he experiences while doing his job. But when a situation arises that does threaten to upend his foundation he is floored. His eyes bulge out of his head and a sick, desperate look crosses his once illuminated and energetic face.

Ryan Bingham reminds me of celebrity journalist Marcello in 1967s La Dolce Vita. Both love what they do and represent the pinnacle of male freedom, wealth, good looks and external bliss. Eating away at each of them, though, is reality. Once they come to recognize that such a thing actually exists in their encapsulated world they do not know how to deal with it. Anxiety, loneliness, rejection and fear all manage to set in when they take note of a dose of reality.

All of what Ryan has learned is about to endure a tumultuous change. His boss (Jason Bateman) has come to realize that even their company in Omaha has been economically struggling. He hires Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a young woman freshly out of college and currently in the throes of love. Her state of mind is meant to clash with Ryan’s state. The script adapted by Reitman from the Walter Kirn novel does so wonderfully. Natalie has devised a technology which would put people like Ryan behind a computer and out of the skies. Instead of physically going to the location of the firing this technology will allow a multitude of people to do such a thing via webcam. This is moving beyond Ryan’s only talent. Physical human contact and emotion will be negated. Ryan, to begin with, has never had physical contact. He doesn’t even have a firm relationship with his family either. His sister is slated to get married and he never even met the groom. The introduction of this new world, this technology, isn’t meant to scare him away like Tommy Lee Jones’ character was in No Country for Old Men, it is meant to educate him in being more social, more absorbed with physical relationships. The film wants to make Ryan a better person.

Up in the Air not only tackles the problems of the current economic struggles our country is facing, but the film gets to the core of what makes man vulnerable: Love. Being that Ryan never experienced love he doesn’t know how to deal with it. A vacuous space has occupied his heart for quite some time. It is what his job calls for. He proclaims himself to be a “wake-up call” to those he fires. Nothing else and nothing more. When he becomes acquainted with Alex (Vera Farmiga) for the first time, a female doppelganger of Ryan who patrols the skies just as fervently as he does, he is clinched to her, like a boy who sees a shiny ball at a toy store. Like Marcello, Ryan mingles around, sleeps with women who can satisfy his sex lust. But at the end of the day he has no true lover, no true companion he can confide to.

Clooney plays Ryan as a modern day Cary Grant; brief and effectively charismatic. His smooth delivery of words is crisp, confident and defined with assurance of what he is saying is the right and only way. Clooney’s character is both egotistically smooth and vulnerable.  His persona is at once intimidating and then works its way into the realms of vulnerability. The benevolent smile and demeanor can be dented by the harshness of reality and love. Clooney works best when his conceit has been disconnected with his personality. The stupor disposition he so willfully and gloriously inhabits here is his most heartfelt.

Reitman’s film may be mistaken as being too calm and subdued. Its look radiates that kind of vibe. Reitman is after something deeper than his two previous films (Juno and Thank You for Smoking) could ever wish to capture. Propagating in a contemptuous behavior is a tantalizing look at the life of one man always on the go, where nothing seems to be stable and all in front of us is a mere illusion. The only true observation he can adhere to is his acknowledgment of the fact that he is all he has. By concentrating on Ryan Bingham, a rolling stone, Reitman has created a stunning depiction of a person who banishes himself from the fruits of life; frustration, timidity, fear, eagerness, adventure and love. The inability to experience these emotions can lead a person to an unfulfilled life. Thankfully the film doesn’t leave the audience unfulfilled.