Up in the Air
Up in the Air takes its name, it seems, from a song of the same name (or perhaps vice versa). The opening stanza is as follows:
I’m up in the air,
Choices drifting by me everywhere
And I can’t find the one
That would help me do the work I’ve left undone,
‘Cause I’m up in the air.
The entirety of the story is aptly summed up thus. Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, fires for a living. He quite literally fires people every day. That is his job, his occupation, his profession, and he has made a career out of it. Flying around the country, he’s quite content alone, doing his dirty work on the road, in various and sundry hotels all across America, building up his American Airlines SkyMiles (perpetual product placement). Into his life strolls Natalie Keener (played by promising newcomer Anna Kendrick – reminiscent of Amy Adams’s debut, in fact), a top-of-her-class Cornell graduate with a chip on her shoulder. She’s got a thing or two to learn. And Bingham’s the one to teach her. (The parallel of veteran Clooney showing Kendrick the ropes is unmistakable.) The story rolls on, and we fly along with it, learning a thing or two ourselves along the way.
George Clooney just gets better and better. If you haven’t seen Michael Clayton, do yourself a favor. Before now, I would have said it was Clooney at his best, but with the addition of Up in the Air to his growing list of accomplishments, it’s more difficult to differentiate. With the Great Ones, discriminating the best from the rest is more an exercise in preference than it is in aesthetics as such. Clooney is slowly gravitating toward a distinct group of performing artists of whom this is most certainly true.
The supporting cast is equally as wonderful here. Vera Farmiga is transparent through her character’s ostensible lack thereof. And, as mentioned earlier, Anna Kendrick shows substantial promise as an up-and-coming actress. She plays Natalie with a subtle mixture of post-collegiate quixotic pride and rite of passage naiveté, something we young aspiring “professionals” can probably find in ourselves.
Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking, Juno) brings his pen and eye to a poignant story about work, about love, about life. Poets and philosophers have said it many ways. Man is the social animal. And God saw that it was not good for man to be alone. We require others to function properly. A child raised in seclusion, away from others and social development, will develop into a feral creature, a human without much that marks humanity. Adults aren’t so different. Without other people, we are hermits, and hermits are famous for going bonkers. But when we have someone to spend our one fragile life with, purpose and meaning are enkindled where they might not otherwise exist. Sometimes it takes a story like Up in the Air to remind us of just such a truth.
Rating: 3.5/4 Stars
