Normally, movies about selfish, commitphobic men learning about the meaning of life aren’t exactly in my wheelhouse. Actually, any type of Meaning of Life movie isn’t usually in my wheelhouse, although, to be fair, I haven’t tried Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life yet. However, for some inexplicable reason {George Clooney} I found myself interested in watching Up in the Air anyway.

I liked it, but I’m still trying to decide how much I liked it.

Summary:

Ryan (Clooney) makes money by telling people that they’ve been laid off. He flies from city to city and goes to Company A, B, and C, firing people because their bosses don’t have the nutsack to do it themselves. This is more than just Ryan’s job, though. Travel has become Ryan’s way of life. The airport is his home, and his apartment is some place he tries to avoid at all costs. He also has a very nice, casual sex thing going with Alex (Vera Farmiga), another frequent flyer who he meets in a hotel bar.

So, things are going good for Ryan until new hire Natalie (Anna Kendrick) tries to revolutionize the company he works for by making all the “termination engineers” layoff people via webcam, thus endangering Ryan’s luxurious and nomadic existence.. This leads to him questioning what he really wants in life, his relationships, his philosophy, etc, etc.

Notes:

1. This role may not be a huge stretch for George Clooney, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t good. One of Clooney’s strengths is that he seems inherently likable—you can relate to Ryan, root for him, even if this is the kind of guy in real life that you’d want to punch in the face. It’s easy to say that Clooney’s likability is because he handsome (which he is) or because he’s got a great smile (which he does) but I think it’s really about a natural affinity for this kind of role. Ryan’s a charismatic character, and Clooney’s got charisma in spades. He can sell you an idea that you would never have expected to buy. (Unless it’s Batman.)

2. Clooney isn’t the only standout here, though. Even though he’s undoubtedly the protagonist of the piece (hell, he has his own voiceover) his screen time is nicely balanced with Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga, both who easily carry their own weight here and earned their Oscar nods. If I had to pick between the two . . . I might go with Anna Kendrick, purely because of the energy she puts into her tightly-wound character, Natalie.  She pops off the screen every time you see her, and I think she might have a little more to do than Farmiga.

But I’m not sure because Vera Farmiga is very good here too, and everything she says or does on screen is strong and unstudied. Her sensuality, in particularly, seems especially effortless. She doesn’t need to go around screaming, I’m hot, I’m hot! She’s just sexy without having to try for it, and her chemistry with George Clooney is madly natural and awesome.

I’ll talk a little more about Farmiga’s character in the Spoiler Section, but there’s something very practical and decisive I enjoy about Alex. I like how women are portrayed in Up in the Air in general . . . you know, as women and not as damsels in distress or supposed badasses in revealing leather.

3. Up in the Air also has a very impressive supporting cast with actors like J. K. Simmons, Jason Bateman, Melanie Lynskey, Zach Galifianakis, and Sam Elliott. Most of these roles are very brief, anywhere from two to fifteen minutes total, but if you put that much dedication into even your minor casting . . . it’s a very good foundation to work from.

4. Also? Sam Elliott’s mustache seems to get more ridiculous each and every time I see it.

5. I’ve read some backlash against Jason Reitman, but I’ve liked all of his movies so far, and I really enjoy the look of Up in the Air. Props to him and his cinematographer. I especially like how easily George Clooney is shown to navigate the nefarious labyrinth that is The Airport. God, I despise airports. They are foreign and confusing places that charge too much money for everything and force you to strip off your shoes.

6. The script is great, both witty and poignant. Some of the many awesome quotes:

Alex: “We all fall for the pricks. Pricks are spontaneous; they’re unpredictable and fun. And then we’re surprised when they turn out to be pricks.”

Natalie: “I thought I’d be engaged by now. I thought by 23, I’d be married, maybe have a kid, corner office by day, entertaining at night. I was supposed to be driving a Grand Cherokee by now.”
Alex: “Well, life can underwhelm you that way.”

Ryan: “Are you angry at your computer?”
Natalie: “I type with purpose.”

Ryan: “You know that moment when you look into somebody’s eyes and you can feel them staring into your soul and the whole world goes quiet just for a second?”
Natalie: “Yes.”
Ryan: “Right, well, I don’t.

7. There is a particular scene in Up in the Air which begins life as a very cliched scene, like, okay, of course you have to do that scene . . . but then Reitman turns that scene on its head, and it’s very enjoyable to watch. Well, enjoyable may be the wrong word. Refreshing. It’s refreshing to watch.

8. This is kind of an interesting movie because there’s more than just one theme here to really talk about or pick apart. The one that I haven’t seen many other people write about is how a fear of death can translate into a way of life. There’s a short discussion between Ryan and his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Jim (Danny McBride), about how pointless everything is because it all ends the same, anyway, and the question becomes how do you choose to live your life, knowing that at the end of the day, whether you go the family-house-dog route or the fun-sex-no commitment route, you’re going to be the same worm food as everybody else. The answer might seem obvious, but Up in the Air doesn’t take the easy way out, and that’s one of the things I really appreciated about this film.

9. Of course, the other big thing in this movie is how scary it must be to lose your job and your livelihood, especially if there’s no reason for it but budget cutbacks. Up until the last few years, I’ve always been under the impression that if you got fired, it’s because you did something wrong. (Or, more accurately, got caught doing something wrong.) But with the recession, of course, things have changed, and for awhile there, I was seriously concerned that my position at work was going to be eliminated. That fear and uncertainty I experienced—coupled with the unfairness of losing my job when I was a good, if oddly dressed, employee—-was really hard to deal with.

Up in the Air might have been released in 2009, but it’s still a very topical film, in a way that it wouldn’t have been a decade ago when it was originally written.

10. The ending of this movie is a bit on the ambiguous side, and I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to decide if I like that or not. I think I do. I think this might be the kind of movie I appreciate more on each and every viewing, and I think I’m going to warm up to that ending, but when I first finished it, I was like, Huh. Not so sure about that.

11. Finally, I don’t have a lot of negative comments to say about this film. Up in the Air is a very well made, well written, well acted film. That being said . . . I don’t love this one the way I loved, say, Thank You For Smoking (another Jason Reitman film) and there’s something about it that makes me think it’s never going to be a solid A movie for me, even though I can’t list any real flaws in the movie. I enjoyed it. I think it was worth watching. I could even own it. But it’s probably never going to be a favorite. There’s something about it that connects on an intellectual level but not an emotional one for me, and while I don’t think anything’s missing . . . I just don’t adore it enough for it to be anything more than Very Good. Not that this is all bad or anything.

Now, on to . . .

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

SPOILERS

So, Ryan doesn’t just fire people for a living. He also does motivational speaking. His whole shtick is that you should live as free as you can, and that means free of both material possessions that you don’t need as well as relationships that hold you back or any relationships at all, really. So he’s in the middle of this Big Deal speech near the end of the movie when, naturally, he realizes that he doesn’t really buy any of this anymore because he’s grown and all and he might love Alex. Maybe not love, exactly, but he certainly cares more about her than some casual relationship. He wants to see her, like, now.

So Ryan leaves in the middle of said speech and literally runs through an airport to get to her . . . only to discover that she’s actually married with kids and doesn’t look at their relationship as anything more than an escape. (Or a parenthesis, as she says. What is it with writers equating their characters’ stages of life and relationship statuses to punctuation marks?)

Vera Farmiga’s delivery of this is really nicely done. She’s pissed because he almost screwed things up with her family and because she thought they were abundantly clear about the type of relationship they had, but she’s also gentle when she tells him that he can call her if he wants to go back to the casual fun they had. And this is all interesting because you can see it from both angles . . . you get Ryan’s anger that she didn’t tell him she was married . . . and you get her’s because she’s right, they were pretty abundantly clear that their relationship was supposed to be casual and fun, nothing serious. In fact, if I had one problem with the movie at all, it’s that Ryan knows Alex’s home address. The city she lives in is one thing, but her home address is something else entirely. If Alex gave Ryan her home address . . . well, clearly, she wouldn’t do that, so Ryan must have tracked her down, and I have to say, that may seem romantic in a film, but in real life, that’s totally creepy, and I kind of side with Alex on that one.

This development is also really interesting because Alex so clearly has what is usually the “masculine” role in their relationship, and Ryan is the silly woman who wants more. I don’t know that I was shocked by this turn of events—I had considered the possibility that Alex was at least married when she said, earlier in the film, that she couldn’t “act like this at home”—but I thought there was more than a decent chance that the run through the airport ended in the happily ever after it usually does. The turnaround was a touch depressing (you like Alex and Ryan together, after all) but also a nice, surprising thing to see in a movie.

At the end of the film, Ryan’s company has decided not to go with Natalie’s videoconferencing plan, an idea that should make Ryan happy but doesn’t. He has a ridiculous amount of flyer miles (due to a subplot I’m too tired to type about right now) and he stares up at a destination board, literally having the ability to fly wherever the hell he wants. Natalie told him earlier that if she had those miles, she would just pick somewhere she always wanted to see and go, but when the film ends, you only see a plane flying into some clouds with Clooney giving this voiceover:

“The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over.”

And it’s up to you to determine if he took Natalie’s advice and went somewhere new, somewhere spontaneous, or if he’s just going back to his old ways. A lot of people have opinions about this, but I actually don’t know, myself. I’d like to think Ryan isn’t going to live out of his backpack forever, but who knows? The destination board seems to be hinting at optimism, but that monologue certainly did make me wonder.

Like I said earlier, I struggled with this ending a bit, trying to decide if that ambiguity worked for me or not . . . but, ultimately, I think I do kind of like it. And I like the film, too. I just think I need to see it a few more times before I decide what exactly is keeping me from loving it the way I had hoped to.

Tentative Grade:

B+/A-

Moral: 

Life’s better with company.