Up in the Air Review, at long last

Finally I can remove Up in the Air Review from my to-do list (not to mention the picture from the sidebar). I struggled mightily with this review, and I'm still unsure about the rating. That being said, I enjoyed it very much. It's a personal movie. The mere fact of how long it took me to write the review attests to its ability to be thought provoking, and warrants the rating.

Here is the review...

Up in the Air - MUST SEE

Many people will undoubtedly be perplexed, maybe even offended by the timing and tone of Up in the Air. After all, as the nation undergoes one of the longest and deepest economic recessions in history, as millions of Americans lose their jobs and sometimes their hopes, how can Jason Reitman (the director) expect us to identify with Ryan Bingham (the protagonist), who fires people for a living? Maybe it’s because of George Clooney’s effortless performance as Ryan. His easy smile, salt and pepper hair, and avuncular style makes you want to believe him when he assures you that getting fired is actually a great thing. Ok maybe not, but it’s certainly hard to avert your gaze when Ryan is on screen, and he’s got a lot of screen time.

This movie is about Ryan. Ryan is a man of contradictions. On the one hand his job is to fire people for companies who are too efficient to treat their employees with dignity, and deal with the emotional fallout. He is a tool for cowards. His existence is a testament to society’s alienation and dehumanization of social relations, as he relies on these forces and their power to exact human misery in order to prosper. On the other hand, Ryan appears to have a conscience, a moral baseline below which he is unwilling to descend. When Natalie Keener (played by Anna Kendrick of Twilight fame), a young, cost conscious Cornell grad, attempts to revolutionize the business by introducing online layoffs, Ryan quickly becomes perturbed by the ethical consequences. In his mind, serving as the middleman for firing people is acceptable, but doing so half away across the country through a webcam somehow violates common decency. This line in the sand seem arbitrary, even self-serving, for if Keener succeeds, anyone can simply “sit in front of a computer and begin downsizing immediately”, making Ryan obsolete (and jobless).

Yet you get the feeling that his objections, albeit selfish, are not insincere. Ryan seems to genuinely believe in the value of his service, if not the messages he dispenses. You may rightly cringe at the corniness and condescension of catchphrases he throws out to the soon to be unemployed (his favorite is “anyone who ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you are right now, and it’s because they sat there they were able to do it”), but you also have to acknowledge that he at least cares enough to pretend, to hold their hands, and to offer them hope.

The fact that he cares about these passing strangers sitting across from him in sterile conference rooms is incongruent in the same way Ryan lives his life of solitude. While moonlighting as a motivational speaker, Ryan uses a backpack as a symbol for one’s connections to the outside world. Everyone carries a backpack he says, and in it contains the relationships and possessions one holds most dear and spends a lifetime building and accumulating. Ryan’s backpack is empty. He has no wife or children, doesn’t want either, and actively avoids his sisters, the only family members that are still alive. He refuses to decorate his rented apartment or fill his closets, and doesn’t own anything that cannot fit into his rolling suitcase or be purchased in an airport. But still Ryan carries around this empty backpack. He loathes commitment, but demonstrates unflinching loyalty to his choice airline, hotel and car rental company. He fears change and has no dreams of his own, but exhorts others to view being laid off as a career transition and an opportunity to follow their dreams. He carries in his backpack, no matter how temporarily, the most real and intimate connections he has, ones he forms with the people he fires. In order to evade being tied down by responsibilities and compromises that come with long-term relationships, Ryan chooses to interact mostly with airline ticket attendants and hotel concierges. In this world of superficial personality and simulated hospitality, firing people is the only way he gets to see people, however briefly, at their most vulnerable and authentic. He is an intimacy junkie, with a strong urge to be needed but not need others. Thus explains Ryan’s romantic conception of his job. It enables Ryan to have his cake and eat it too – he can get his fix of intimacy from random strangers whom he can discard like used syringes instead of having to invest himself to nurture and sustain it. For him, the prospect of losing his job is as devastating as it is for an addict to lose his dealer.

Natalie and Alex Goran (starring a smoldering Vera Farmiga) serve as apt extensions of Ryan. They are different portrayals of him in his “ideal” form. Natalie personifies the robotic efficiency of Ryan’s routinized existence to its ruthless extreme. She is smart and driven, but also haughty and vain. Seeing life as a series of if then statements, she conjures up elaborate checklists for her perfect guy in the same way she creates flowcharts for remotely firing people. But beneath that façade of dismissive self-confidence lies a nagging insecurity and sense of incompleteness of life without the “right guy”. Just like Ryan, she is terrified of being lonely. Unlike Ryan, she is young and has the luxury to indulge in absolutes.

Alex is what Ryan wants to be. If Natalie is like the picture of rotted lungs you show to smokers to convince them to quit, then Alex is candy-flavored cigarettes Big Tobacco uses to entice kids. In their relationship, she offers Ryan comfort, understanding and satisfies his need to be needed, without making him feel attached. Her skill at juggling his needs and fears lures him into a false sense of security that prompts him to reveal his vulnerabilities. He feels so secure in fact he fails to recognize aspects of himself in Alex, and deludes himself into thinking he can change their relationship without changing each other.

Everyone carries a backpack, in it contains the things one holds most dear and spends a lifetime accumulating. Ryan may have an empty one, but stitched into its bottom are principles and guidelines he lives his life in accordance with. Even as we see him fill and empty his backpack repeatedly throughout the movie, it was perhaps a little unsettling to see him burn it at the end.