Jason Reitman (2009)

A man who earns a living by firing people (with motivational speaking as a sideline), whose philosophy of life is cut out the personal relationships, whose ambition is to join the single-digit elite who’ve earned ten million air miles – and who’s driven in that ambition not by a desire to see the world but to get to the total.  Ryan Bingham spends as much time as possible on planes and in airports and as little as possible in his soulless Omaha apartment.  Introducing himself to us, he explains that:  ‘All the things you probably hate about travelling – the recycled air, the artificial lighting, the digital juice dispensers and mini pizzas tacked to their heat lamps – are the warm reminders that I’m home.’  There can’t be too many people watching who will feel that Ryan has got his priorities right or that his existence is fulfilling but Up in the Air is the story of a man who comes to see that his life is hollow – to realise, in other words, what the average member of the audience could have told him from the start.  Yet Ryan is very smart, as well as being handsome, self-assured, professionally and sexually successful.  He’s also too cannily self-centred to have slipped into a modus vivendi he didn’t mean to have.  Ryan doesn’t believe in marriage or love, or that human beings are altruistic creatures (‘We’re sharks’); he’s sure that ‘We all die alone’ and, in a rare reference to the older generations of his family, mentions parents and grandparents being carted off to care homes – something which clearly appalled him.  I took from all this that Ryan had resolved to live as he does as the least worst response to what he saw as the meaninglessness of human existence.  He has two sisters, with whom he has negligible contact.  It’s his experiences over the weekend of the younger sister’s wedding, however, that begin to erode his inveterate self-sufficiency.

Ryan is accompanied to the wedding by Alex Goran, a woman he met on his travels and who seems to be a kindred spirit (a frequent flyer who wants sex without personal commitment).  But he starts to fall in love with her and is shockingly rebuffed.  Alex turns out to be married, with children; she’s horrified when Ryan fails to abide by the rules of their game and she tells him, crushingly, that he was an ‘escape from real life … a parenthesis’.  You can believe that Ryan would be floored by this rejection because it makes him look foolish – and because he also is dismayed that he violated his own code of conduct.  It’s harder to believe that the experience doesn’t confirm Ryan in what he’d long been sure was the best way to live, and that he doesn’t revert to this.  Instead, he starts thinking about other people:  he writes an unsolicited and admiring reference for the work colleague who had threatened the essential fabric of his life.  He transfers huge numbers of air miles to his newly-married sister and her husband, who couldn’t afford a honeymoon.  But he also now perceives that his existence – his own existence, rather than all human life – is pointless:  the film ends with Ryan staring bleakly at an airport departures board with no idea where to go next.  If he wants to start being a nice person who gets married and has kids, why doesn’t he just get on with it?  (He already had a lot going for him and now appears to have learned to have feelings too.)  If, on the other hand, he regrets that he briefly changed his ways, surely he’s not compromised beyond repair.

The set-up of Up in the Air requires Ryan Bingham to get his comeuppance and the script, which Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner adapted from a 2001 novel of the same name by Walter Kim, is too sophisticated to give Ryan a conventional happy ending.  It’s not bold enough, though, to give him an unconventional happy ending – a return to the life which made him happy.  It’s clear from the Wikipedia piece on the novel that it’s very different from the film.  (The book’s commercial success, following good reviews, stalled after 9/11:  its jacket shows one of the cartoon figures falling to earth in flames.)  Walter Kim:

‘… wrote the book in rural Montana during a snowbound winter on a ranch while thinking about airports, airplanes and about a particular conversation he had with another passenger in a first class cabin.  That passenger stated that he used to have an apartment in Atlanta but never used it.  He got a storage locker instead, since he stayed in hotels and was on the road 300 days a year.  He considered the flight crew to be like family, and indicated that he knew the flight attendant by name and knew her kids’ names.’

Jason Reitman seems to be as risk-averse in his relationship with the cinema audience as Ryan Bingham is in his personal life.  Even with George Clooney in the role, the film is at pains to skirt the danger of giving Ryan’s introversion its due – in case we might find that disturbing.  Reitman sometimes pushes a bit too hard to ensure a miserable outcome for his protagonist.  When he’s explaining his air miles ambitions to his snippy young colleague Natalie Keener, as they tour the country firing people, Ryan enthuses about the perks that come with reaching his target.  It’s hard to credit that someone so cool would be boyishly excited about meeting the airline’s chief pilot but Ryan has to be so that his moment of triumph when it arrives – mid-flight, with a planeload of passengers applauding the news that he is the latest ten million air miles man – can turn to ashes.  The chief pilot does indeed shake Ryan’s hand and asks him where he’s from.  Ryan replies, ‘I’m from here’, bleakly and distantly.

It’s Ryan’s line of work that makes us see him most clearly as a heartless bastard and is the film’s hook.  The Career Transition Counselling outfit for which he works also has a topicality unforeseen when Up in the Air was first published, when Jason Reitman wrote the first draft of the screenplay,  when there wasn’t a recession in sight.  Filming began at the start of 2009, in the depths of one –and Reitman was ready to exploit what had become reality:  most of the people looking into his camera to be told ‘your position is no longer required’ are people who really had lost their jobs.  (According to Wikipedia, these men and women made up their own words – either what they remembered saying when they lost their job in the real world or what they would have liked to say – and it’s not surprising that much of this is powerful.  I was particularly struck by the man who said that people had told him that, when you lost your job, it was like losing a member of the family but that, ‘I thought of my work colleagues as my family so that, when I lost my job, it was like I’d died’.)  The corporate downsizing world in which Ryan Bingham works – he and his colleagues are paid to give the hard word to employees of firms whose management ‘don’t have the balls to do it themselves’ – is a satirically rich locale.  The young go-getter Natalie, fresh out of an Ivy League university, develops a plan to cut costs by having the firing done by video-conferencing, instead of face to face, with the result that Ryan and the rest of the team will be grounded.  This is a good idea, one invented (as is the character of Natalie) by Reitman and Sheldon Turner.  It provides scope for Ryan, in the face of a stunning threat to his natural environment and air miles agenda, to come out with splendid cant about the inhumaneness of sacking people remotely, in comparison to dismissing them from the other side of a desk.

Their screenplay is clever but Reitman and Turner have to resort to some clumsy and improbable manoeuvres to make crucial things happen.   Ryan walks out of a keynote address he’s giving to a convention and hotfoots it to Alex’s home in Chicago, there to discover she’s a wife and mother.  It seems highly unlikely that Alex, given the boundaries she sets for their relationship, would have supplied Ryan with her home address – how did he get hold it?  (This isn’t a question Alex asks in the phone conversation that’s the last contact between them.)   After she’s dumped him, Ryan returns to the office and his boss asks for a word.  For a moment you wonder if Ryan is going to be the latest redundancy but quite the reverse:  the internet sacking programme has been put on ice and Ryan can resume living on planes.  The event that’s triggered this is the suicide of someone fired by Natalie on her travels with Ryan – a woman who, during their interview, had joked about throwing herself off a bridge.  Natalie was alarmed at the time; Ryan assured her this kind of thing ‘doesn’t happen’.  When she asks if he’s done research to be sure of that, he says quickly, ‘You don’t go there’.  Natalie’s far too cussed to be fobbed off with this but she doesn’t pursue it.  Instead, we’re supposed to believe that, when the woman kills herself, Natalie is so shocked that she immediately quits the organisation and looks for a different career.

The rather impersonal fluency of Reitman’s direction – the assured, matter of fact way the film neatly skewers its targets – puts Up in the Air in danger of becoming an example of the confident heartlessness it’s exposing.  But Reitman’s fluency is a pleasure too.  The opening titles – over a montage of aerial shots high above the earth then coming down to ground level – are enjoyable simply because they are so slick.  (They’re accompanied by a version of ‘This Land is Your Land’.)  The dialogue crackles from start to finish.  The film is intelligent, smoothly proficient and entertaining – no mean achievement.  It’s at its best when the characters are well aware of what they’re doing.  The courtship scene – Ryan and Alex seduce each other in a competitive exchange about air miles totals and experiences in the Mile High Club, each flashing an array of credit and loyalty cards to turn the other on – is the most obvious highlight.  Another, more subtle one comes at the wedding of Ryan’s sister Julie, when husband-to-be Jim gets cold feet at the eleventh hour and Ryan’s elder sister Kara urges him to use his motivational skills to sort things out.  Ryan switches uneasily between commending married life and admitting it’s a sham but eventually comes up with a soundbite – ‘Life’s better with a co-pilot’ – that hits home with Jim and rescues the situation.  Ryan seems rather shocked – both that he made a wobbly pitch and that he’s helped a person in distress.  Up in the Air is also strong in moments where the characters are believably surprised.  Because Julie and Jim haven’t the money for a honeymoon, the wedding guests are asked to photograph cardboard cutouts of the happy couple in front of famous exotic locations.  Ryan clearly seems the right man for the job and grudgingly applies himself to it when Kara asks him to help out.  At a supper on the eve of the wedding, he presents Julie with the photos he’s taken and she asks him to pin them on the wall with the others – he’s struck by how many others.  This is a good moment because you’ve no difficulty accepting that Ryan, thoroughly egocentric and unused to doing favours, would assume he must be the sole contributor to the collection.  (The cutouts make for some nice comedy along the way – even if it’s less easy to believe that Ryan would allow the cardboard heads to peep out of the top of his sleek luggage, into which they won’t quite fit.)

George Clooney reminds us that his comic timing is one of the treats of current cinema but he isn’t afraid either to use his charm to uncomfortable effect.  You watch Ryan in his work – he’s measured, affably serious, truly disarming.  He switches effortlessly between discreet sympathy and stern-but-kind exhortation to think positively about how losing your job may be the first step to a better future.  As usual, Clooney plays his role with unpompous integrity:  he doesn’t distance himself from Ryan to show that he disapproves of the man.   In one sense, this is no great gamble given Clooney’s strength of connection with cinema audiences – men and women – and the reserves of good will he can draw on.  Even so, you sense that, without his acting becoming self-conscious, Clooney is also putting himself into the character in an unusual way – that he’s aware that some people seeing him in this role will be reminded of his own public vow never to get married (or remarried – Talia Balsam was his wife for a few years a couple of decades ago).  He creates a masterly portrait of a man used to getting his own way, and shows how he fights to get it in different situations.  You see this as clearly in the rivalrous seduction scene with Alex as in the gripping exchanges between Ryan and Natalie, when he has to pull out the stops to demonstrate that her internet firing proposal isn’t as brilliant as she thinks.  Ryan’s amused condescension runs as deep as anything in him – it’s there in his treatment of both Alex and Natalie, in his first conversation with the reluctant bridegroom, in his glances at the wedding procession.  In spite of my reservations about the resolution of the story and the character, I’m sure Clooney’s desolate look at the departures board at the end of Up in the Air will become famous.

The whole cast is just about impeccable.  Vera Farmiga as Alex does a very witty job of sparring with Ryan and she’s extraordinarily skilful in creating different kinds of emotional distance from the other female characters in the story.  Farmiga has a wonderful moment at the end of the weekend of Julie’s wedding when she parts from Ryan at the airport and says, ‘Call me when you’re lonely’.  She walks away a few steps and he says, ‘I’m lonely’, and grins at her.  She smiles back but her face tenses with the realisation that he might mean it.  Alex is all woman and Anna Kendrick’s Natalie complements her perfectly.  Of course it’s always great to see again people you love to watch on screen but Kendrick here is a reminder of the excitement and impact a new face can bring.  When you don’t know an actor who is utterly convincing in their role, as Kendrick is, the reality can be startling.  The ardently ambitious Natalie is all kinds of miniature wildlife – a mouse, a shrew, a weasel.  She wears her two-piece suit like armour and her pony tail like a weapon.  The half-smile playing round the tight little mouth on her childish face is always ready to turn into something more unpleasant, usually a sneer, although it also seems right when Natalie gets a text that her boyfriend has ditched her and starts sobbing loudly in the middle of a hotel lobby.  Anna Kendrick develops the character convincingly – for example, in the way that this very conventional girl registers unease as she sees how unconventional Ryan is.  Jason Reitman is a bit evasive about whether it’s possible to be a career transition counsellor if you’re not a callous shit:  Natalie’s eventual departure suggests not, although it might have been interesting to have had one member of the organisation who seemed personally irreproachable.  As it is, Jason Bateman (one of the best things in Reitman’s previous film, Juno) does an impressive dead-eyes-dead-soul turn as the company boss.  The reliable J K Simmons (also from Juno) is one of the few actors on the receiving end of bad news on the jobs front – it’s a tribute to him that he doesn’t stand out from the real dis-employed.  Amy Morton (Kara) and Melanie Lynskey (Julie) come through strongly as Ryan’s sisters, as does Danny McBride as Jim.  Sam Elliott brings his impressive moustache to the small role of the chief pilot who makes Ryan’s specious air miles dream come true.

16 January 2010