Up in the Air

Up in the Air starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick, written by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner from the novel by Walter Kirn, directed by Jason Reitman (2009): Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, who splits his time between giving motivation seminars on how to eliminate all of one's attachments so as to be a better money-maker and working for a firm that contracts him out to other firms to fire people.

Yes, he's a professional firer for companies too wimpy to do it themselves. Bingham spends about 300 days of the year on the road, and would spend more if he could -- his apartment in Omaha, Nebraska, site of the company's headquarters, is pretty much empty, and his only consuming interest appears to be becoming only the 7th person in history to collect 10 million air miles on American Airlines.

The gist of the plot is as follows: Bingham's company wants to save money by having all the firing done by teleconferencing; Bingham shows them the problems with this idea; Bingham and the young, female hotshot who came up with the idea of teleconferencing go on the road so she can see how firing people works; Bingham begins to get attached to a travelling female executive with whom he's started an initially sex-focused relationship; Bingham has to go to his sister's wedding; people learn better, sort of.

Up in the Air (doesn't that sound like the title of a basketball movie?) works on the basis of the charm of its actors, fairly sharp dialogue writing, and the increasingly assured direction of Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You For Smoking).

Indeed, Clooney's charm is such that it's easy to forget that he's really quite a dick for most of the movie -- and didn't Norm on Cheers have a similar job for one episode, albeit within only one company? The scenes in which Bingham goes back to his small town in Wisconsin for his sister's wedding don't quite work, and will probably give some conservatives a few paragraphs of ranting on Hollywood's depiction of everyone living in the flyover states as gormless boobs, or perhaps boobless gorns.

The movie portrays pretty much everyone in the small town as a comic grotesque, and never manages to make it clear that this is simply Bingham's view of them, or that this is some sort of sudden shift into social satire about how soulless people view salt-of-the-earth types, or that this is actually what small-town people are really like. It's as if the airplane had landed in a kinder, less funny Melonville.

Other than that problematic plot divergence, the movie really does sing at times, and the ending is blessedly free of a completely sentimental resolution. Also, Sam Elliott makes a cameo that seems as if it's wandered in from a Coen Brothers movie, so that's good too. In a year without many decent Hollywood dramas or comedies, this movie does stand out, not as a masterpiece, but as a solid piece of entertainment for people over the age of 12. Recommended.