Movie Review: "Up in the Air"
Wife and I went to see "Up in the Air" last night. Naturally, we left the boys home. We offered to take them, but they declined, and we didn't insist, seeing that they were not being punished for anything. :-) The film was a bit of a departure from your typical holiday-season romantic comedy, which made it quite enjoyable.
"Up in the Air" is the story of Ryan Bingham, who makes a living firing people. He works for a company that is brought in when other companies do layoffs. Bingham tells us it's because the bosses of the people being laid off have no guts, but there's a ton of legal-ese involved when firing someone, and bringing in pros who know what to say and not say can reduce the lawsuit count. The premise of a guy who fires people for a living is worth a number of both laughs and thought-provoking moments throughout the film, and Clooney does the part justice.
The romantic connection of the film does not involve Bingham's job so much as how his job is done. Ryan Bingham is a "road warrior," someone who spends the bulk of his time away from home. The nature of the gig is such that Bingham may end up in three or four differnt cities in a week. That's a lot of air travel, living in hotels, and hanging out in hotel bars.
(review continues with SPOILERS after the jump)
It's in a hotel bar that Bingham meets Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga). Alex is another road warrior, at the gold-to-platinum level. Still, that's way below the kind of numbers Bingham books in his ambition to become a 10-million-miler with American Airlines. He's got the AA credit card that turns every purchase he makes in his life into miles. He's on planes almost nightly (he does motivational speaking gigs as well as firing people), and rings up righteous tabs with Hilton and Hertz as well. He chats up Alex in the bar with an opening line about rental cars and they end up back in his room. It's quite believable, trust me, road warriors are often just that geeky, and some of them do indeed look as hot as Vera Farmiga. Ryan and Alex begin what appears to be a zip-less on-the-road sort of relationship, hooking up when their schedules intersect.
A huge complication enters Bingham's life in the form of a young 20something woman, Natalie Keener (played by Anna Kendrick). Keener has pitched Bingham's company that the future of firing people is to do it over the Internet, via a webcam/Skype sort of connection. Such a system would dramatically reduce the company's expenses, keeping Bingham and his colleagues in the office, but it would totally destroy Bingham's way of life. He makes the case that Natalie doesn't understand the personal factors involved in firing someone, and ends up having to take her on the road with him as a trainee. Working with Natalie, who doesn't want to be a road warrior, forces Bingham to re-think his lifestyle and philosophy. That re-thinking bursts when he brings Alex to his younger sister's wedding. The road warriors expect to have just another weekend fling, but Bingham leaves with deeper feelings. When he pursues those feelings back to Alex's home in Chicago, he discovers she's married and has a family. Her road warrior self is totally different and detached from her home self.
It's not a typical ending for a holiday-season romantic comedy. When you see Bingham running through an airport to get a flight to Chicago to go to Alex, you can almost feel the cliches rising. The let-down is well-played, as is Alex's response. The movie's denouement is also well-done.
"Up in the Air" is a winner on multiple levels.
