Up in the Air

I suppose, if you're going to be fired, then you may as well be fired by George Clooney. Who among us could sit opposite Hollywood's lovable scallywag and not accept a redundancy package like it was an offer of a weekend in Vegas? As Ryan Bingham, a professional ‘career transition counsellor', Clooney criss-crosses the continental United States, laying off employees for corporations that would prefer not to soil their hands with the task. Termination is his business and in recession-hit America business is good. Like death with a smile and a handshake instead of a scythe, he rides the pale horse of the airways, with no personal goals but the kudos of clocking up ten million frequent flyer miles.

Bingham is at home in departure lounges and hotel rooms, bypassing lengthy check-in queues because of his valued-customer status and navigating security checks with the elegance of a ballet dancer. He even moonlights as a motivational speaker, giving a lecture titled ‘What's in Your Backpack?' that espouses the virtues of an unencumbered life. His carefree existence leaves him free for casual dalliances with fellow business travellers like Alex (Vera Farmiga), with whom he bonds in a hotel bar over a comparison of the virtues of rental car companies Hertz and Maestro. Relationships, to Ryan, are excess baggage, but Alex comes without strings: "Think of me as yourself, only with a vagina," she assures him.   

His perverse love of constant travel comes under threat when a brittle young colleague, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), wants to implement a system of firing via Skype, thus saving millions in airfares. Bingham prefers to sack people face to face, which in the film's skewed logic makes him a kind of saint. Agreeing that Natalie lacks practical experience of letting people go, her boss (Jason Bateman) sends her out with Bingham to learn the ropes of the career transition business.

Up in the Air asks us to sympathise with a man who has no friends, a lousy relationship with his sisters, and a shitty job that involves ruining people's lives. Perhaps only Clooney, and director Jason Reitman, could pull this off. (Reitman made a tobacco-industry lobbyist likeable in Thank You for Smoking, and teenage pregnancy a cause for breezy banter in Juno.) But what goes up must come down, and when Bingham starts to have feelings for Alex, inviting her to his sister's wedding, you know that the movie's final destination won't be that far from Redemption City, Arizona.  

Based on a novel by Walter Kirn, this is a thoughtful romantic comedy steeped in the harsh ironies of 21st century business - how travel gets us nowhere, how communication technologies isolate us, and how it's easy to mistake a job for a life. Performances are really fine - especially from the casually seductive Farmiga - and visually, it's a blast, with Eric Steelberg's camera capturing spectacular bird's-eye views of American cities. Up in the Air reinforces the fact that the appeal of air travel is much like the appeal of being single: full of exciting possibilities, but a real drag after a while. Everybody needs a co-pilot. Nick Dent