FILM REVIEW: Up in the Air – The American Dream, Grounded
The opening scene of director Jason Reitman’s new film “Up In The Air” features a soulful yet deeply ironic version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” – accompanied by aerial shots of Anywhere, USA from 10,000 feet up. The familiar tune, repackaged tongue in cheek, is quickly followed by a quick-cut montage of newly-fired anonymous company employees – the white collar workers of a troubled U.S. economy – unpacking their souls in front of the camera.
Their attentive listener is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a professional pink slip dispenser and occasional motivational speaker whose chief raison d’etre is to remain in perpetual motion, forever between places, time zones, and relationships. “To know me is to fly with me,” explains Bingham, who delivers “how big is your backpack” advice to rapt if road-weary conference attendees who quietly gather in random hotel conference rooms, when he is not deftly downsizing unfortunate white collar types in rapid-fire solipsistic sojourns to Dallas, Omaha, Miami, Chicago, and other cities from coast to coast. “I tell people how to avoid commitment,” he confides to the audience at one point.
“The Road” is Ryan’s home, and he much prefers a nomadic existence of permanent weightlessness as a so-called “transition specialist” – 270 days in flight – to the realities of living on the ground. Light on his feet, Bingham has made his peace with life “up in the air,” including a new-found occasional romantic rendezvous with a woman named Alex, a fellow “elite status” traveler, with whom Bingham enjoys witty verbal banter and casual sex. “Just think of me as yourself,” Alex explains to Bingham via mobile phone, “only with a vagina.”
All is well with Ryan Bingham and his quest to attain his goal of 10 million travel miles, until his world is rocked by a young and confident new consultant named Natalie Keener who convinces company management to embrace a “glocal” policy of “virtual downsizing” via tele-screen. Suddenly, Bingham’s bedouin-like suitcase-savvy happy-traveler world is turned upside down, but he sees an opportunity to educate Keener in the hows and whys of “making limbo tolerable” for newly-canned corporate
unfortunates. “I stereotype,” he explains to Keener in one of a dozen airports in the film. “It’s faster.”
Director Reitman has a knack for channeling the American cultural zeitgeist. His last film, “Thank You For Smoking,” arrived in theaters just as American public opinion turned on the tobacco companies in earnest. In a 21st century America marked by severe recession (we can’t use the “d” word – yet), massive job layoffs, and an uncertain future, “Up In The Air” explores difficult territory, especially when we hear the voices of those employees cast adrift by the impersonal vagaries of corporate misfortune (apparently Reitman captured interviews with the real-life downsized as fodder for the film.) And the arch-eyed, cynical, and slightly-off-kilter George Clooney, in his guise as Ryan Bingham of the Empty Backpack, is a near-perfect divining stick for channeling the mojo that infuses our post-modern Facebook-surfing, cellphone sporting civilization of yak yak, marked by euphemistic buzz phrases and a culture grounded in nothing but placeless-ness and shallow expressions of good will. “This is America, this is what we were promised,” one character confides to him toward the film’s end. “Oh, really?” Reitman seems to be asking.
And yet, oddly, Reitman manages some nods to our essential humanity here – in the drunken Cyndi Lauper karaoke, the perfunctory pillow talk via text messages, and his sophisticated if subtle sense that the transitory nature of “practicing protocol” might ultimately lead to something more lasting. “You have set up a life of permanent self-banishment,” Keener snarls at Bingham in one tense moment. Perhaps, and it is Bingham’s insistence on face-to-face firing over virtual axe-dropping that represents the last relational thread connecting him to his fellow man.
And in the real world of the U.S. Empire, with the airline industry in the throes of semi-permanent bankruptcy, job losses at 20 percent nationally, the federal government at the mercy of the Big Banksters, and the specter of Peak Oil knocking on the door, “exploring our options,” as Keener so happily phrases it, and turning to our neighbors and friends for deliberate community building on the ground, may be our best collective step forward, a more realistic 21st century alternative to life “up in the air.”
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