Up in the Air
Directed by Jason Reitman
Starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, Danny McBride
If Ed Norton’s character in Fight Club had never met his Tyler Durden but instead continued along his cornflower blue career trajectory into the Naugahyde Nirvana of executive class airport bars and swipe-card hotel loyalty upgrades for which he was surely bound, then he might very well have found himself downing martinis at 35,000 feet while trading shopworn motivational aphorisms and mile-high war stories with George Clooney’s corporate management consultant Ryan Bingham, the asset-stripping focus of Jason Juno Reitman's latest, Up In The Air.
Bingham spends his whole life in the wild blue yonder, jetting across America downsizing companies and firing people. He takes no pleasure from his role as a ‘transitional counsellor’, but it’s a dirty job and someone has to do it, and Ryan just happens to possess the requisite blend of steeliness, affability and detachment to do it very, very well. And once it’s done, he’s packed his hand luggage (no wasteful luggage check-ins for a seasoned pro like Bingham), scarfed down a bowl of complementary peanuts in an faceless business class lounge and is sitting pretty at cruising altitude, zooming ever closer toward his cherished dream of being one of the very few people ever to rack up ten million air miles.
Like a shark, Bingham’s only motivation is incessant forward movement. He has no real home, no friends or emotional ties and that’s just the way he likes it. But when head office calls him back to base and informs him that, henceforth, his job will be done via videoconferencing and that he can hang up his wings – along with his million mile dreams - cracks start to form in his immaculate GQ veneer. He gradually comprehends that the hermetic, temperature controlled insularity with which he has cocooned himself might not serve him so well back on terra firma. And won’t be so easy to slough off.
As an allegory for the dislocation the modern world can foster and the atomisation of the family unit – in whatever form - Jason ‘Son of Ivan’ Reitman’s ultimately wan adaptation of Walter Kirn’s novel couldn’t proceed from a finer set-up. Comfort, ease and the pointlessly rinky-dink trappings of the world around him have seduced Bingham to the point where he no longer needs human interaction, and Reitman explores this mindset with a good deal of wit and style. When the film strands Bingham on the Tarmac, however, things become a good deal more complicated for him, and – alas - immediately and supremely formulaic for us.
His boss (a bearded Bateman) foists a bright young hotshot (Kendrick) on him, through whom he learns that his job affects more lives than he imagined; a casual relationship with a similarly self-satisfied high-flyer (Farmiga) gives him a glimpse of the life he might have had; and a family wedding offers him a chance to come back into the fold. None of this is at all hard to watch, but it feels like the second half of the film is a TV Movie continuation of the first, and what begins as a surprisingly successful mixture of Michael Clayton and Intolerable Cruelty eventuallyskirts uncomfortably close to the unfilmed epilogue to Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
