Susan Granger’s review of “Up in the Air” (Paramount Pictures)
No other picture this year captures contemporary angst like this bittersweet tale of an emotionally alienated, rootless frequent flyer, a suave corporate executive who travels 322 days a year and considers VIP lounges and a seat in business class as home, confessing, “To know me is to fly with me.”
Cynical Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is a transitional expert or “termination engineer,” which means he makes his living by firing other firms’ employees, explaining “We are here to make limbo tolerable…This is an opportunity for rebirth.” En route to his prestige status goal of accumulating 10 million American Airlines miles, Bingham thrives on dispassionate downsizing, along with delivering “What’s In Your Backpack?” motivational lectures, advocating shedding the weight of possessions and relationships and being unattached to anyone or anything. He even establishes an easy-going sexual relationship with a likeminded fellow traveler, Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), who tells him, “Just think of me as you think of yourself, only with a vagina.”
But then Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a twentysomething efficiency analyst, tries to sell his Omaha-based boss, Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman), on the money-saving concept of grounding Ryan and his cohorts by going “glocal,” global-turned-local, which translates into firing people via video-conferencing, rather than face-to-face. Sandwiched among business trips to Wichita, Kansas City, Des Moines, Tulsa, Detroit and Miami – with naïve Natalie tagging along – peripatetic Bingham has an obligation to attend the wedding of his younger sister (Melanie Lynskey) in Milwaukee, after which he must face an unexpected mid-life crisis.
Director Jason Reitman (“Juno,” “Thank You For Smoking”), working with writer Sheldon Turner in adapting Walter Kirn’s novel, creates a perceptive, often surprising, fast-paced socio-economic satire, an existentialist tragic-comedy that perceptively taps into current anxieties and recession fears as devastated employees experience real-life layoffs; those are not bit actors, they’re real victims of job loss. George Clooney deserves Oscar recognition as the charismatic rogue, as does Vera Farmiga as his sexy counterpart; their timing together is terrific. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Up in the Air’ is a timely, turbulent 10 – without doubt, one of the best pictures of the year.
