Jason Reitman's "Up in the Air' (2nd review)

Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, now getting a second go-round in advance of the Oscar awards, is this year's Hollywood morality tale. It features a sharp and often witty script by Reitman and Sheldon Turner, shrewd and focused performances by its principals, and the kind of crisp editing and intercut that distinguishes the better Hollywood product.

It also has the bloodlines of those hard-bitten Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges comedies of the '30s and '40s, not to mention those of Reitman's father Ivan, director of the Ghostbuster franchise and a co-producer of this film. And it has a throwback protagonist in George Clooney, who has quietly evolved into this generation's Cary Grant.

In short, this is a Depression-era film for our times.

A word about Clooney. He inhabits the screen so naturally that he makes it look easy, a quality Grant also possessed. Like Grant, too, Clooney looks slickly corporate: elegantly turned out, impeccably attired, unflappable in all situations. His smile is warm but wary; it offers charm but no commitment. He's the slippery devil you can't resist.

Of course, Grant had more strings to his bow than that. Clooney does, too, and for more complex reasons. We don't trust our heroes any more, and we have less confidence in facades. Grant's Roger Thornhill in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) is mistaken for a wanted man, and must spend the entire film proving that he is, as he says, simply a New York adman— that is, a purveyor of illusion, nothing at all. It doesn't matter, though, because we're willing to take him for whatever he wants to be, just as Eva Marie Saint's Eve Kendall does.

The Clooney version, though, isn't so trustworthy. And if Up in the Air's love interest, Alex (Vera Farmiga), is willing to take his Ryan Bingham as he comes, it's only because she's hiding a secret of her own.

Bearer of bad news

America may be the only place where who you are is so tightly defined by what you do. Ryan Bingham fires people. Professionally. Ryan works for a company that specializes in giving the bad news to other firms' employees. He tirelessly crosses the country— have gun, will travel— to pull the plug on people. He's engaging but firm. He maintains eye contact at all times— very important in an angel of death. He gives you a spiel, encouraging you to see victimization as opportunity. He gives you a placement packet. He sees you through your first reaction of shock, tears, anger, and gently directs you back to your office to pack up.

It's a nasty job, but someone has to do it, and your employer prefers to delegate it to someone else. Ryan is the buffer. He absorbs the anger, deflects the shock, and gets you out the door. You're not going to go postal on Ryan.

Chileans had a name for it

I say "you," because we have no word for the millions who've been turned out in our job-devouring economy, or disonomy as we might better call it. The men and women who aren't coming back to work, or at any rate to careers; the ones who've fallen through the cracks that have now become rifts and gulfs as whole industries plummet. Argentina and Chile knew the name to use for such people, who vanished during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s: the "disappeared." Of course, our "disappeared" aren't dead. They live, suffer, and hope.

Ryan disappears people for a living. He flies everywhere in the continental U.S. to deliver his news, just like the real angel of death. He does this so well that he's on the point of joining an exclusive club of just seven members: ten-million-mile flyers.

How does Ryan do it? As he explains to his fellow frequent flyer Alex, a willowy blonde with whom he trysts whenever their flight paths cross, it's all about standing outside, being detached. Ryan doesn't make the decision, he merely communicates it. He helps you stand outside yourself. You don't make a scene with Ryan; you collect your things and leave quietly.

Charles Bronson's artistic side

Ryan's words have an eerie echo. They're the same ones Charles Bronson uses in Michael Winner's 1970s film, The Mechanic, in which Bronson plays an assassin who also works for a "company." Bronson's mechanic regards himself as an artist, and each execution as an artistic performance. In a world of disorder, his is the necessary order.

Ryan and his colleagues, too, joke about being "terminators." There isn't any word for what they do, just as there isn't one for the people they do it to. But they've raised firing to an art form. They give aesthetic shape to a messy act; they give it meaning and not just function. This is what true professionals do.

The trouble comes when the company hires a bright young thing, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who sells the boss on the idea of firing by video hookup. There's no more face to face, no more eye contact. But there are also no more bills for flying agents all around the country, doing what can now be done from a cubicle.

Ryan is grounded. He's demoted. He still performs the same job, but now as a technician rather than as an artist.

A taste of the business

Ryan talks his boss into giving Natalie a taste of the business by flying her around on one of his circuits as an apprentice. This, he argues, will develop better protocols for the new program. Natalie, who's never confronted her own emotions, naturally gets a shock. But Ryan is now standing back from what he normally does directly, and he too begins to see the suffering he inflicts from a different perspective.

He starts getting sentimental. He finds he's serious about Alex, and takes her home for his sister's wedding.

Suddenly, the film seems about to go south on us. We can see Ryan finding redemption and true love. This is not what a Preston Sturges film should do.

Fortunately, Reitman pulls Up in the Air out of its nosedive. Alex, it turns out, has a life and an agenda of her own— and, in a neat reversal of the usual sex roles, she gives Ryan the brush-off.

Meanwhile, Natalie does her own crash and burn, and, when one of her "disappeared" commits suicide, the company yanks her program and decides to go back to the personal touch. This should be good news for Ryan, but he's no longer the same man, doing his O. J. Simpson sprint through airports on his way to the next kill site. Instead, we're left with a view of Ryan staring up at a flight board, searching for the one destination it doesn't have— a place he can land for good.

Echoes of Willy Loman

The film's last shot shows a cloudbank as seen from the air, with Ryan in voice-over sharing a final thought with us: "The stars will wheel forever from their daytime hiding places, and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over." So, Ryan will be back in the air after all, endlessly circling his prey?

But the line echoes something else, Charley's summation of Willy Loman's life in Death of a Salesman: ". . . for a salesman, there is no rock to the life. . . . He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine."

Ryan is no salesman, but he is a messenger up in the blue, also with a smile and a shoeshine. And what he's announcing is the death of the American dream.♦


To read another review by Judy Weightman, click here.