Up in the Air

Spoilers abound, both as to the film and the novel:

I watched Up in the Air over the past couple of nights, and I did wind up liking it, although perhaps not as much as the Walter Kirn novel that it is very loosely drawn from. The novel was published just months before 9/11, which automatically made it something of a period piece. Since Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner reasonably enough chose not to adapt it that way, updating was inevitable. The novel is thin on the plot-and-characters side, since it is narrated by Ryan Bingham and really takes place mostly inside his head (and, as becomes apparent eventually, his head's not quite right). The novel focuses not on Ryan's decision to forgo a "personal life," which is simply a given, but more on his "mileage quest" and also his hope of landing a job with a shadowy corporation called MythQuest. 

The film downplays the mileage quest, largely eliminates Ryan's conceptualization of his chosen reality as "Airworld," and dumps MythQuest altogether. It beefs up and completely changes the minor character of Ryan's hook-up (the Vera Farmiga character, Alex), expands the importance of Ryan's family, adds the wedding sequence, and adds the Anna Kendrick character Natalie and the plotline involving the coming changes in the nature of the termination business. All those are shrewd changes with respect to making a marketable mainstream movie, but they do conventionalize the story considerably.

As a study of corporate angst, Up in the Air is very good but not in the same league as Laurent Cantet's Time Out, a film so great on that subject as to completely overshadow all proximate competition. Last week I watched a French film, Nicolas Klotz's Heartbeat Detector, which also ventures onto Cantet's turf (explored by him in the fine Human Resources as well as in Time Out), and I thought: This is pointless, Mr. Klotz, you can't remotely match the film you're obviously influenced by. Up in the Air is far from pointless, but it doesn't cut as close to the bone as Time Out, either.

A little sentimentality creeps in to Up in the Air, although thankfully not as much as a less able screenwriting/directing team might have allowed. The third act revelation of Alex's duplicity is exceedingly well done (and Vera Farmiga's acting is simply superb). There will be no rom-com happy ending here (which probably cut into the film's box office take; it is a downer). The other third act twist, involving a suicide, is more melodramatic but not badly handled; we didn't take that woman's threats seriously either, since she seemed so composed as she delivered them. But the film is diminished by the last-minute sentimental suggestion that Ryan was right all along, and that being laid off actually strengthens people's characters and their relations to their loved ones. It does not; this has been studied by countless sociologists and psychologists. Unemployment tears psyches and families apart; it harms society at the core. During that concluding two minutes of "testimony," I got angry at the movie.     

At first I thought that George Clooney was dialing in his performance, but he deepens it as he goes; no doubt that was the conscious strategy on his and Reitman's part. His Ryan is nowhere near as eccentric as the book's Ryan, so it makes sense that the movie will reveal that his hidden yearnings are much like anyone else's; and when those yearnings are denied, it is unquestionably touching. It adds to the pathos that the movie's Ryan is a good ten years older than the film's Ryan; Clooney is a mature guy now (and Reitman gives Anna Kendrick a line -- "He's old" -- to emphasize this). I realized sometime around the mid-point that part of what makes the movie is that Clooney's Bingham is just not all that smart; he's merely marginally smart. The novel's Ryan realizes that his days doing what he's doing are numbered; given the nature of his job, how could he not realize it? Clooney's failure to realize that leads to some easy irony -- he gets as defensive when threatened as any of the people he lays off -- but because it is suave, smooth, always-on-top-of-things George Clooney who is gradually revealed as witless, the movie hits a deeper truth that movies seldom aim for, which is that a majority of the enviable-seeming achievers who appear to have things "all figured out" are actually as vulnerable as you and me. Confidence is a useful tone to be able to convey, but it doesn't necessarily correspond to some kind of impregnability; as Emerson wrote, "No one has a prosperity so high and firm that two or three words can't dishearten it." In Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham hears those "words," and at its best that is what the movie is about.