Up in the Air
Grade: A | Genre: Drama
Summary: This film was one of the year’s best and deserves to be showered with accolades for Clooney and Reitman come awards season.
The Great Recession has claimed the heads of countless jobs as the days painfully snowball into months. The unemployment figure currently sits at 10% while the number of underemployed is a staggering 17.2%. We feel for our friends, family and neighbors as they bring news of being the latest to join the unemployment line, but have you ever thought about the person who is sitting on the opposite side of the table from them? I’m talking about the man wielding the rope to the guillotine. “Up in the Air” takes on that unenviable task through telling the story of Ryan Bingham, a hired gun who executives hire to fly in for the afternoon and take care of their dirty work. Just like Reitman’s previous work, “Thank You for Smoking,” “Up in the Air” does a fabulous job presenting Bingham as a character that we sympathize with and want to see grow as a person.
Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is a man who defines the term road warrior. His home are the airports he flies out of and the Hilton hotels where he racks up oodles of preferred guest points. His suitcase is exactingly organized and his attachments are non-existent. He can’t be bothered with family, a wife, the kids. He’s married to his job, and his job is bringing misery to others. While it sounds like a pretty grueling life to most of us, he thrives in this strange existence, chasing frequent flyer points and picking up women in a hotel bar. For his role as the grim reaper, he brings a no nonsense approach that looks to push the newly unemployed out the door yet tries to help them find their feet and dignity in the process.
|
|
Life is rolling along just peachy until he’s called back to Omaha for a company wide meeting. A new hot shot MBA, Natalie Keener played by Anna Kendrick (Twilight), comes in and overnight revolutionizes the business of firing, making Ryan obsolete. Instead of circling the US with an ax, they’ll instead be dispatching the troubling news via videoconference. It’s about a step up from dumping your girlfriend via text message. Ryan’s lifestyle is teetering on the brink. His boss, a slimy Jason Bateman, suggests he take young Natalie out on the road with him so she can learn the business in an effort to hone the technological elements they are poised to implement. Bingham throws Natalie into the lion’s den, showing her the faces and lives that are being ripped apart in the hopes that she’ll see the error in her plans to shred the last piece of dignity these people are clutching onto.
Ryan also is sticking his big toe into the frigid water known as attachment. After hooking up with a fellow road warrior Alex, played by Vera Farmiga (The Departed), he arranges several future rendezvous based on where their flight paths cross. As their meetings become more frequent, his carefully constructed wall starts to slowly crumble. He’s falling for her, but has no idea how to reconcile this wave of emotion with his life built with the sole purpose of avoiding attachments.
Clooney is fantastic stepping into the skin of Bingham. He deftly expresses the character’s cocksure confidence, and highly structured existence. When life tries to skew that rigid view, we see his internal struggle toiling about inside him. The addition of Natalie, who evidently was an added character when the book jumped to the screen, is a pivotal element. Her interactions with Bingham really pinpoint who this character is and where he is going.
Co-writer and director Jason Reitman produces another solid film to add to his already blossoming portfolio — “Thank You for Smoking” and “Juno.” If he continues to maintain this high-level of consistency, it won’t be long before we are lumping him in with the likes of Scorsese and Eastwood. Overall, “Up in the Air” is a very nicely made film. We get a fascinating character study of Ryan Bingham and watch as he bounces off and bleeds into these critical people milling about his life. The only real reservation I had was the ending. It’s not that it was bad more so that it rubbed against the grain of where the story had taken us up to that point. Regardless, this film was one of the year’s best and deserves to be showered with accolades for Clooney and Reitman come awards season.
Release Date: December 25, 2009