Up in the Air (2009)
Saturday, November 12, 2011 at 6:16PM I watched the DVD this weekend.
Ryan Bingham lives up in the air and in hotels and airports. He has reached exalted levels in the road warrior's loyalty programs, and lives the life of nobility that the programs provide, and so his neglected home is less than a young man's starting-out pad. His least desired journeys are trips home. All is well and he weaves efficiently through hotel receptions and rental car parks and check-ins and security and boarding gates, collecting nights and miles on a journey to a 10-million miles status with his preferred airline. While almost there he meets Alex who is living likewise, and is as unattached as he, it seems, and they begin a non-relationship, experiencing each other when their circuits cross. Then they begin to design their travels in a way as to have them cross, and in the meantime Bingham's office teams him with another woman, Natalie, very much younger, who promises to automate Bingham's job into a back office process, threatening to ground Bingham before he has reached his 10-millionth mile.
Bingham works in the offices of others. His job is to mass-fire people for his clients, and his business is at its best when the general business is at its worst. He does his work pat, with smooth confident talk that shows pickles of humanity while he works his subjects. He fires so many people in his travels, he cannot remember the calm threat one of them made that she would jump off a bridge into the river near her home. He really forgets—Bingham is not the type to lie. But the woman's suicide is not the crisis; the story has no crisis.
There are revelatory moments for Bingham as the story advances, specially on the run up to his sister's marriage, and after that, when he goes to Alex's home to surprise her there. Bingham is a good man with a tough job, driven by his journey to 10-million miles. What happens when he crosses that mile? When he wins the promise of that very special status, denoted by a loyalty card that is gray-black but gleams like it came from heaven? The movie is mostly funny, threatens to get sentimental for a time, but lands back soon enough and safely among the contradictions where it is set.
Director: Jason Reitman | Writers: Walter Kirn (novel) ; Jason Reitman (screenplay) | Stars: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick
