Movie Review: Up in the Air (2009, Directed by Jason Reitman)

Up in the Air, in the tradition of classic screwball comedies like Sullivan’s Travels and Bringing up Baby, serves as a snapshot of our times. Director Jason Reitman, of Juno and Thank You For Smoking fame, manages to tackle the recession and the soaring unemployment rate with a successful blend of witty banter and genuine pathos. He leads his audience down a well worn Hollywood path with the anticipation of a simplistic resolution and then thwarts their expectations with a heavy dose of reality. Reitman’s film manages to feel simultaneously like an old-fashioned entertainment and an edgy darkly comic indie gem. It’s Reitman’s most successful film to date, and one of the most genuinely exciting pictures to come out in 2009.

George Clooney, the closest thing contemporary Americans have to a Cary Grant, plays Ryan Bingham, a corporate downsizing expert who spends 320 or so days of the year on the road (or, more accurately, up in the air). Bingham travels from city to city to inform employees of recession-plagued companies that their services are no longer needed. Clooney’s character is the kind of man who racks up frequent flyer miles with no particular purpose in mind. He is more interested in the status symbol of a “platinum card” than the possibility of a free trip around the world. Bingham “lives” in Omaha, although we see that his apartment looks even more austere and barely lived in than the anonymous hotels he frequents throughout the nation.

Into Bingham’s life come two strong, determined women. Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) is a young hotshot who has plans to revolutionize the business of corporate downsizing. Why is Bingham’s company sending him and several other “downsizers” on expensive trips when they could be firing people from the comforts of Omaha via teleconferencing? Bingham, not a homebody by any means, opposes this strategy and is less than thrilled when his boss asks Keener to tag along on one of Bingham’s multi-city “downsizing trips” to show her the secrets of the trade. We also meet Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), a woman so similar to Bingham in personality and lifestyle that it’s scary. We never find out for sure what Goran does for a living, but it doesn’t really matter. Both characters share a love for hotel food, platinum cards, and frequent flyer miles. They, as they say, “hit it off.”

The joys of Up in the Air’s humorous façade are tempered by the dark undercurrents of unemployment and economic insecurity. Bingham’s job is secure simply because he fires people for a living, an industry that is booming in these troubled times. However, the unfortunate individuals Bingham “conferences with” every day are not as fortunate. The fact that Reitman brilliantly casts recently unemployed Americans in these small roles as the “fired” makes us sympathize with their plights to an even greater extent.

I was afraid that Reitman’s film was veering into conventional movie land as it reached its third act. Bingham attends his sister’s wedding in rural Wisconsin, bringing Goran along as a date. For about twenty minutes, the movie feels incredibly uninspired as Bingham finds himself involved in a “runaway groom” scenario. He must convince his sister’s fiancé to go through with the ceremony using the most vapid Hollywood clichés in the book. As the film’s credits rolled, however, I realized why Reitman included these twenty minutes of sheer boredom. We are convinced for a bit that everything will be okay and Bingham’s character will “change” for the better based on his experiences. I don’t want to ruin the ending, but let’s just say the lessons learned by the film’s end are nominal. Reitman wisely avoids the path of least resistance and instead leaves the audience with an unsettled feeling. We sense that Bingham’s character will probably have a fulfilling life in the end, but we don’t know for sure. Up in the Air leaves it up to us to speculate on what tomorrow will bring. For this reason, Reitman’s movie manages to capture the uncertainties of our time better than any other film this year. Indeed, the future is truly up in the air.