From the Ledge

For most of my professional life, I have traveled regularly, sometimes gruelingly, for work, first in Asia, when I was right out of university in the Philippines, and then within the domestic US for the past ten years or so.   Business travel is quite different from leisure travel:  you’re usually stuck working 12-14 hour days in some nowheresville location (King of Prussia, PA?  Dubuque, IA?  Tulsa, OK? Just some of my glamorous markers over the past decade of being on the road for work), staying in nondescript, generic chain hotels with bad instant coffee beside the coffeemaker in the bathroom, stuck in nondescript, generic airports waiting out a snowstorm, a thunderstorm, or general airline wackiness such as delayed flight crews and missing airplanes (which happened to me recently- I mean an airplane should either be at the hangar or at the gate, right? I was flabbergasted that American Airlines delayed my flight for two hours because no one seemed to know where the plane was parked at!).  People who’ve never traveled frequently for their job would never understand the bone-weariness, the loneliness, the sublimated gnawing that there should be a life beyond airport security lines and boarding passes that “road warriors” experience.  Or that almost irrational need to accumulate airline miles and hotel points, almost as if getting that United 1K frequent flier status or that Starwood Hotels’ Platinum Preferred Guest elite level can make up for the significant amount of personal and home time that you’ve given up.   So I’m blown away by Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, starring George Clooney, based on the novel by Walter Kirn, currently being buzzed about as a strong Oscar Best Picture contender.  At the risk of sounding clichéd, it’s like the film held up a piercing mirror to the lifestyle I’ve led.  Many scenes seemed to have been picked out of my and many of my friends’ recent worklives. And although I continue to admire Precious and The Hurt Locker, the two other anointed Oscar frontrunners, and consider them significant cinematic achievements, I have to say Up In the Air is more resonant, more emotionally-satisfying, and definitely, my hands-down pick for the Best Film of 2009 so far.

Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a career transition counselor, who crisscrosses the country to terminate employees on behalf of their managers.  He’s also a part-time motivational speaker, who speaks to groups of people very similar to those he fires.  There are layers of interesting irony in the writing, which Clooney, with an impressively nuanced performance, brings to clear, emotionally walloping life.  How can a man who has no time for meaningful relationships (except for no-strings-attached dalliances with fellow road warriors such as Alex, played with a surplus of smoldering intelligence and craftiness by the excellent Vera Farmiga) be able to empathize with someone’s anguish on breaking the news about job loss to his or her loved ones?  How can a person who makes a living out of breaking people’s identity and self-esteem, so significantly tied in our day and age to our jobs, help people feel better about themselves and their lives? Clooney is terrific in the role, both sympathetic and confidently unapologetic about his character’s contradictions.  Bingham is also focused on achieving the singular goal of becoming only the 7^th person ever to become an American Airlines’ 10 million mile flyer, a goal that is nearly jeopardized by a young, brash colleague, Natalie, brilliantly, ferociously played by Anna Kendrick, who has convinced the company’s CEO (a hilariously slimy Jason Bateman) to conduct all termination meetings over videoconference instead of in-person, effectively grounding all career transition counselors in the company’s, gulp, Omaha headquarters.  When Bingham protests, the CEO forces him to take Natalie on the road so she can truly understand what it takes to do the job.

There are so many perfectly written scenes throughout the movie as Bingham gradually discovers an ability to build relationships and deal with complicated feelings:  he takes on a coaching, paternalistic attitude towards the eager-to-learn Natalie on the mad ways of business travel; and he starts thinking of Alex as someone more than his girl-in-every-other-port distraction.  Reitman and co-writer Sheldon Turner’s lines are zippy and sharp as a pointed knife and the scenes themselves are so true to life, BFF Debra and I wondered whether they hired a management consultant to work with them.  (The tips on who to avoid and who to get behind of in an airport security line? Yep, I have those as well.  The ridiculously hilarious IT conference sequence which ends with people running through the lobby in their bare feet?  Yep, reminds me of conference shenanigans from a couple of years ago which ended in a conga line through the lobby of the Miami Intercontinental at 1 am.  The hotel bar flirtation between Clooney and Farmiga that begins with comparing each other’s airline, hotel, and car rental elite statuses and ends in something racier than a Hertz mid-size car?  Uhmm, ahem.)  I love the writing, so polished, so unmelodramatic, so biting but at the same time provocative.  I especially admire Reitman’s and Turner’s ability to vividly and honestly paint lives within the framework of our current economic fears, without either being jaded cynical or bleeding heart sentimental.  Reitman’s use of recently-laid off non-actors to play some of the terminated employees, and having them speak in their voice and words on how they would have reacted to their firing, is powerful and memorable.  It’s a confident and bold directorial choice.

I’m not a big Clooney fan (and I thought his Oscar-winning performance in Syriana was overblown), but I think he gives a strong, fully-inhabited performance in this film. (When he tells Kendrick that he has made a “lifestyle” choice to never settle down and have a family, I feel my throat choking up, because I recognize a part of myself, and of many people I’ve know in 10 years of management consulting, in Clooney’s delivery and expressions).  But he has two co-stars that play at his exceptional, upped game, as well.  I liked Farmiga a lot in The Departed, but she is fantastic here as a woman “married to her career”, ballsy and strong-willed, but also willing to show flashes of vulnerability and regret.  When she tells Kendrick’s Natalie about what kind of guy and life a woman wants to have in her mid thirties, she is superlative.  It is Kendrick, though, who almost walks away with the movie.  I’ve known many colleagues like her Natalie, extremely competitive, almost cutthroat in the eagerness to impress and one-up others in the room, but Kendrick’s achievement is in infusing the character with an additional, complicated mix of self-doubt, masked naïveté, and emotional pull.  She is riveting in her big breakdown scenes (such as when a fired employee tells her that she’ll walk out of the room and throw herself off a bridge; or when her boyfriend breaks up with), but genius when she plays it small (such as how she deals with a middle-aged man’s breakdown over video conference or her subtle reactions when Ryan wouldn’t let her run the meetings).  It’s a first-class performance which is a shoo-in for an Academy Award nomination.

Critics and bloggers alike have criticized the film for its “limited ambitions” or for being “mildly challenging”, as if those are artistic capital crimes.  I admit Up in the Air does not have the emotional heft of Precious or the socio-political relevance of The Hurt Locker.  But it is a film that tells a real, unvarnished story of our times, a story that reflects the alienation and lack of joy that has been created in many of it’s audiences work lives, brought about by the way their jobs have been structured and the companies they work for have been run, and the lifestyle choices they’ve been forced against the wall with.  It isn’t a story about abuse and poverty in the projects or a story about soldiers in Iraq, but it is still a story that needs to be told, and Reitman, Clooney, et al, tell it finely and thoughtfully. It’s an executive platinum of a movie.

Up in the Air is going into wide release in Chicago this weekend.

Tags: Up In the Air