The meaning of life on the road

Rating: 10/10 (13 December 2009)

George Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a man detached from all commitments and relationships in Jason Reitman's brilliant film Up in the Air, based on the novel of the same name by Walter Kim.
Bingham is a man hired by other companies who are too afraid or lazy to fire their own employees. Bingham is trained to handle those employees who may be disgruntled, emotionally unstable, or just plain let down. In this harsh economic climate, Bingham and the company he works for is booming. Bingham spends on average about nine months of the year in the air and away from "home" or Omaha, Nebraska. Life is good for the man who has more frequent flyer miles than one could even think of having.
Everything seems to be going great until he is called back to the office and is introduced to Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a young, Ivy leaguer who proposes that using video conferencing instead of face-to-face confrontation to fire people will save the company a large chunk of change. Bingham sees that his livelihood is being threatened, demands that he be left on the road. His boss, played by Jason Bateman, sees this as an opportunity to show Natalie the ways of the business and tells Ryan that he needs to have her tag along. Seeing as this is his only way of staying on the road, he reluctantly agrees.
Bingham shows Natalie a fast paced world of concierge service, minibars, and how to manage people. What Bingham didn't expect was to see what his life has become and how he is going live out the rest of his days; alone. Unless he changes it.
Clooney and Kendrick are fantastic together. Clooney's smooth talking and confident screen presence is balanced nicely by Kendrick's emotional and slightly neurotic tendencies. Along with these two is Vera Farmiga, whose relationship with Clooney's character blossoms out of their love for the road. They are an unconventional couple, but they would never admit that they're together.
This is a truly remarkable story. This film has been described as 'the film of the moment,' and it is just that. There are many films coming out about the Iraq war and the impact it has on the soldiers as well as at home, but here we have one of the first films other than Michael Moore's documentary Capitalism: A Love Story, to show the economic downfall that this country has faced. It's a startling look at what is going on out there across the country. It's a poignant reminder that there are a lot of people out there suffering and have little to comfort them.
Reitman does an excellent job not just selling the characters and their story but the time and space that this takes place in. We are shown office buildings void of workers, yet here comes Clooney and Kendrick to lay off even more from a business that has already been hit hard. Each lay off we witness is almost like a real testimonial. We see the sadness, the despair, and the anger that people exude when they realize their lives have been turned upside down by someone they don't ever know.
There are a lot of powerful images in this film, especially where we can see how alone these characters really are. Each airport terminal starts to blend together to form this artificial, sterile, and uninviting environment that no person could truly ever love. As we delve into the life of Ryan Bingham, we see how truly alone he really is, and how he is a truly remarkable person to be able to deal with a life like this. His story is unlike any other.