Up in the Air

Many of the women I know stop breathing for an instant when George Clooney’s name comes up. He’s a classic ladies man in that gravelly-voiced, smooth-talking Clark Gable way, engaging and unattainable at the same time.

Many men are also smitten by Clooney, although they usually don’t stop breathing. He’s a classic man’s man in the Clark Gable style, a likeable rogue with a Teflon heart.

I get it but I really don’t get it. I know that Clooney wrote and directed Good Night and Good Luck, the powerful, spot-on, 2005 film about political courage during the witch hunts of the McCarthy era. But the guy always seemed like an empty suit to me, albeit one that is impeccably tailored and pressed. In movies like Syriana, Burn After Reading and Solaris he seems more a personality type than an actor, a demographic niche identified by focus groups, Tom Cruise, not Sean Penn.

All this changed when I saw Up in the Air in which Clooney delivers a nuanced, comic and truly moving performance. Was he always this good and I missed it, or is this something new? Doesn’t matter: I’m smitten now, too.

Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who travels around the country firing people. He’s the Music Man of termination, a sunny, inspirational hatchet man who prides himself on being professional (some would say clinically detached) with those about to be dispatched. If a terminee says she’s going to jump off a bridge, that’s not his problem; catching the next flight out is. Writer/director Jason Reitman takes the time to capture the pain and humiliation of people being unceremoniously thrown off the corporate bus, a poignant reminder of the millions who have lost their job since the financial meltdown.

Bingham is, of course, the kinder, gentler face of cold-blooded corporate masters who are even less interested in him than he is in his clients. His main squeeze outside work is amassing the cards and awards that open doors to higher status privileges for road warriors like him. His dream is to accrue the 10 million miles of air travel it takes to earn an elite card that has been by attained by only three other people in the history of the world. This is a natural for him because he feels more at home at 35,000 feet in the company of strangers than he does at home with himself.

The plot begins to bubble when Ryan meets a fellow business nomad named Alex (Vera Farmiga), a woman who tells him in so many words that she’s exactly like him except with a vagina. Can’t hope for much more than that. For perhaps the first time in his life, Ryan feels that he can be himself with someone, and it’s quite moving to see the valves of his heart flutter open a bit, revealing but then quickly covering up unexpected depths. It’s similar to what Bill Murray’s character did in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation but Clooney is more emotionally exposed. His heart is an uncirculated coin, never worn down in the commerce of life, unspent but also undamaged. He’s touchingly open to the possibility of love, not disillusioned beyond repair.

Meanwhile, Ryan’s company hires Natalie (Anna Kendrick), an edgy, cocksure young woman with a degree in psychology, who thinks people can be fired through teleconferencing. She’s the next big thing in impersonal HR, Bingham’s terminator. The big boss, Craig (Jason Bateman), smooth and removed like Bingham but domesticated, sends Ryan and Natalie out on the road together to field test the idea.

And so it goes. Jason Reitman’s film delivers a higher than average quality in-flight entertainment meal. I generally don’t like films that feel too carefully weighed and measured, audience tested, but I enjoyed this one because it was smart about it and moved deftly through its story. Up in the Air liberates Ryan’s inner Tom Hanks/Jimmy Stewart everyman, the part’s that’s gone missing from post-modern American life. It’s an easy watching reminder that our success as human beings is not based on what we do or what we have but who we are.