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.

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