Up In The Air: Frequent Firer Miles

Having been fired from my job just a week and a half ago, I wasn’t too inclined to sympathize with George Clooney’s character in Up in the Air, a man who flies all over the country firing people for a living. (The movie’s conceit is that there are a lot of bosses who would rather pay a professional to fire their employees than go through the stress of doing it themselves — I have no idea if this is true or if it’s a satirical idea that Walter Kirn invented in his source novel.) But Clooney is such a dashing leading man, and he has such chemistry with Vera Farmiga, who plays a businesswoman who shares Clooney’s zeal for the nomadic, no-attachment life of the road warrior (runway warrior? tarmac warrior?), that I would have happily gone along with Up in the Air if it had been nothing but a fizzy sophisticated comedy celebrating the romantic possibilities of airport lounges, rented cars, and luxury hotel rooms. Clooney and Farmiga could have been a 21st-century Astaire and Rogers, only instead of waltzing across all-white penthouse apartments, they could have spent the movie gliding stylishly through O’Hare Airport before — literally — dancing above the clouds.

But Up in the Air doesn’t want to be an escapist fantasy; director/co-writer Jason Reitman has decided this needs to be a movie about The Times We Live In, and so he devotes most of the film into demonstrating why Clooney’s contentment with his rootless, no-frills life is a false contentment, and why his chemistry with Farmiga is a false chemistry.

And that’s where the film gets into trouble. Clooney doesn’t get his comeuppance, exactly, but he does have to learn to put more value on forging human connections — like his younger sister (Melanie Lynskey) is doing by getting married to an aspiring real estate tycoon (Danny McBride). But at the same time, you get the feeling that this particular marriage will probably be more emotionally and financially stressful than it’s worth. And in a weird way, Clooney spends a lot of the movie actually championing the value of human connection — when Anna Kendrick, a rising young star at his company (the character is literally named Keener), suggests that they could save a lot of money by sitting their staff of “termination representatives” in front of some computer screens in Omaha and having them fire people via iChat, Clooney insists that a face-to-face meeting is a much more human and dignified way to tell someone they’re getting the axe.

You can see his point, even though it’s also kind of absurd — but I’m not sure Reitman sees the absurdity in it. There are a couple of small moments where we see the cynical side of how Clooney goes about his job — how he speaks the same empty words of encouragement in the same “sympathetic” voice to everyone he fires, how he artfully muzzles any potential outburst of anger or tears — but on the whole, Reitman still makes sure Clooney comes across as a decent, admirable guy, a hatchetman with a heart of gold. There’s a long section of the film where Clooney takes Kendrick on the road and shows her how he does his job, and Reitman scores a lot of laughs off Kendrick as this little whippersnapper finds out that firing people isn’t as easy as she thinks it is. But what is she actually doing wrong? She’s giving people an opening to get angry instead of defusing the situation and muffling and “managing” all their emotions like Clooney does. If anything, firing people in person seems more about making Clooney feel better about the process. But again, I’m not sure if that’s the impression Reitman wanted me to come away with.

I just can’t figure this movie out; yes, it’s grappling with America’s new economic reality, but it’s doing so in a way that only people who still travel business class can relate to. It’s about the spiritual crisis of a shallow man, but the tasteful cinematography and the strummy guitar music on the soundtrack keep cuing us to perceive it as something profound. To me, Up in the Air might have been better off had it tried to be a little more funny and a lot less "important." Maybe my Astaire/Rogers conceit would have required Clooney to have a different job, something more sympathetic that still required him to fly all the time. Maybe Reitman could have dropped the whole “professional firer” angle and simply made Clooney a motivational speaker — in the movie, when he’s not firing people, the character has a successful side career delivering lectures about simplifying your life. (He’s hoping to parlay the gig into a self-help book deal.) After all, these are some of the movie’s best scenes; Clooney’s lecture, entitled What’s In Your Backpack?, strikes just the right note of empty faux-profundity.

Up in the Air is a skillfully made movie (or at least skillfully packaged), and its two-hour running time passes by as pleasurably and frictionlessly as a flight on a well-run airline. But it leaves you with less to think about afterward than it promises to. You might as well have sat through What’s In Your Backpack?