Jason Reitman directs George Clooney as a business executive with a whack of frequent flyer miles who finds himself unexpectedly grounded after his company institutes a virtual termination program. Hoping to save his travel budget, and his sanity, he heads out with a novice voyager who accidentally triggers a wholesale examination of personal purpose. A smartly subversive analysis of our current, ungrounded reality that prefers celebrating speed over substance and corporate branding over individual invention, Up in the Air dares to ask the difference between being a "somebody" and just being yourself.
Starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick
Rating: Four stars out of five
Once upon a time, air travel was synonymous with glamour, wealth and modern worldliness. Pillbox-capped flight attendants affirmed a sense of personal importance, while the very act of rising high above the clouds ensured a sense of social superiority.
If you were in the air, you were a somebody.
That was before the days of deregulation, before flip-flops and sweatpants were considered suitable attire, and before the airport turned into an overpriced bus terminal laced with benign art, metastasized franchise outlets and four-dollar bottled water.
These days, being in the air is really just another brand of limbo: a test of the human soul, one step removed from Earth.
Certainly, that's what it's become for Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), an executive who's been criss-crossing the continent for decades to fire people with a little personal flair.
When we meet Ryan, we immediately recognize how good he is at his job. Thanks to his warm brown eyes and mellifluous voice, Ryan can terminate employees with all the efficiency and empathy of a dental surgeon removing a rotten tooth: It's all dull routine for him, but he makes you believe you're special.
Ryan knows it's a game, but he takes it seriously, because, as a single man who spends just a few weeks a year in his under-furnished one-bedroom, it's pretty much all he's got.
If he weren't so handsome, and so apparently self-content, we'd feel sorry for Ryan. Yet, when we first hook up with the central character in Jason Reitman's (Juno, Thank You for Smoking) latest ride on the quirky side, we can't help but admire Ryan as some latter-day version of travel-savvy James Bond.
The man has fancy graphite preferred customer cards, turnkey hotel reservations, and a strategy for crashing any convention. For a middle-aged man, Ryan comes wrapped in a leathery skin of aging cool -- and he's loving it, until the boss (Jason Bateman) clips his wings.
Called back to headquarters to be trained on a new computer system that allows for "virtual termination," Ryan finds himself grounded for the first time in years, and it throws his entire system into shock.
Making things even tougher for the itchy-footed Lothario is the fact that he was just about to close in on 10 million frequent-flyer miles -- a landmark number that comes with endless perks, and a personal visit from the pilot.
For Ryan, the platinum passenger card is the closest thing to a life purpose he's ever entertained. The card would give him meaning, and serve as a constant reminder that his abdication from the planet's physical rules and personal connections was all for a good reason.
Without a boarding pass, Ryan feels the weight of his earthly burden, but just before he collapses in a puddle of entry-level existentialism, he gets a second chance to fly.
Assigned to hit the road with new wunderkind Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) -- the genius behind computer-based termination -- Ryan feels the wind beneath his wings once more.
He's relieved, but he can sense a difference: He suddenly feels the impermanence, and begins looking at the world from a whole new perspective.
Without getting into the well-crafted details of the narrative based on Walter Kirn's novel, it's enough to say Reitman exposes Ryan to several sources of potential meaning -- from committed romantic love to family bonds -- over the course of the film.
Fittingly, he also keeps things incredibly light -- despite leaden subjects such as infidelity and pathological narcissism. Reitman is able to travel great emotional distances without tedium or turbulence, because he injects just enough humour into every scene.
Part of this victory was a mere matter of casting Clooney in the lead: Those twinkling brown eyes of his can communicate jaded weariness with a sexy sense of "so what?" in the very same glance.
A smartly subversive analysis of our current, ungrounded reality that prefers celebrating speed over substance and corporate branding over individual invention, Up in the Air dares to ask what the difference is between being a "somebody" and just being yourself.
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