“Up in the Air” (2009)

This deft combination of character study, social satire and romance is very much a film of the moment.  Set against the backdrop of the American recession, its protagonist is a senior player in a firm that has never been so busy.  George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who criss crosses the continent charged with a task no one else wants: the job of telling other people that they’re fired.  As one proud of the fact that he has reduced all material and personal ties to an absolute minimum Bingham tailors his lifestyle to his vocation, spending all but a handful of days in perpetual travel.  He enjoys himself so much that he feels the need to invent a personal philosophy to espouse the wisdom of a committment free existence, launching a side career as a motivational speaker.

The film’s greatest strength is that it manages to side step the obvious.  Hollywood scenarios about self-loathing loaners usually fall into the trap of redeeming their anti-heroes through love.  Nothing so simple minded is going on here: while Bingham comes to question his prime tenets when he falls a little harder for a similarly jet-setting woman than he initially thinks, there is no easy way of turning his life around.  He might reconnect with his long estranged sisters - one of whom, played by New Zealand’s own Melaine Lynskey, is about to get married - but the extent to which he can reconstruct himself as a ‘family man’ is wisely seen as limited.  If you set out to play the role of bastard you’ll fall victim to your own success: superficial engagement with life can at best only lead to superficial happiness.

Writer-director Jason Reitman’s decision to use people who have recently suffered their own real-life job loss amongst the array of Bingham’s clients gives the satire a solid grounding, off setting the type of easy cynicism that limited his debut feature “Thank You for Smoking”.  There’s a Greek-chorus like element to these folks’ monologues that packs a greater emotional whallop than you first expect, especially toward the end when some of the more poignant stories are revisited and expanded upon.

My only criticism would be that both the basic scenario and the actual stories that are interwoven into it are uniformly middle class.  “Up in the Air” might be a tragic story but the nature of that tragedy is that of the educated and the comparitively well off losing status and self respect.  In other words we are not talking impoverishment, destitution and going hungry.  This is not the story of America’s homeless or Haiti’s earthquake victims, it is one of mortgage foreclosure and  loss of identity.

On the other hand, to complain about what a film is not is churlish, particularly when there is so much to admire in “Up in the Air”.  Clooney is, of course, perfectly cast as Bingham, managing to make him charming and credible without letting the character in any way off the moral hook.  Jason Bateman follows his creepy turn in Reitman’s “Juno” as the sleezy, would-be adoptive father with a much darker role as Bingham’s boss.  Anna Kendrick finds the right note as the young career woman seeking to depersonalise the firing procedure still further and Vera Farmiga is scarily sexy and ultimately just plain scary as the clinical love interest who inadvertantly undermines Bingham’s smug belief system.

In a year when the box office went the way of science fiction and allegory, “Up in the Air” captures the zeitgeist like no other high profile release.  It’s smart, funny and even a little bit political, giving fresh hope that Hollywood can engage with the issues of the day on an adult level without giving way to cliche.  In someways it’s the least we should expect from intelligent filmmakers, in other ways it’s a minor miracle.