Simplistic but very entertaining

Rating: 6/10 (27 December 2010)

Up In The Air is one of those movies where the parts are much better than the whole. It has a lot of pieces of good-to-great storytelling, but none of it adds up to anything at the end. This film is like a lovely house that's been perfectly painted, expect the painters weren't paying close enough attention and each side of the house is a different color. Each side looks great on its own but when you step back and look at the whole house, the overall affect is unsatisfying.
Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is a modern nomad, living out of hotel rooms and his travel case as he flies from city to city, firing people when their own bosses don't have the stomach for it. What would be a hellish existence for many people is a joy to Ryan. He's so happy living his life constantly in motion and unencumbered that he's built up a side business giving corporate speeches on "emptying out the backpack of your life" and freeing yourself from the demands of both possessions and relationships. Ryan's even managed to land himself a pseudo-girlfriend in the smart and sexy Alex (Vera Farmiga), another constant business traveler who hooks up with Ryan at various hotels whenever their schedules coincide.
Ryan gets thrown for a loop, however, when his bosses decide to stop sending him all over the country to fire people and just do it over the internet. At least that's the plan put forth by Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), the very young and very smart new girl at Ryan's company. Feeling that his perfect life is threatened, Ryan pokes enough holes in Natalie's proposals that he's assigned to take her out on the road and teach her the basics of the termination business. As Natalie learns that taking away people's jobs is a bit more involved than she thought, Ryan begins to reconsider his unattached reality. But just as he decides that maybe life is better lived with others, he's staggered by a series of surprises and challenges that leave him right where he was at the start of the filmbut with a completely different outlook on things.
There's a lot to love about Up In The Air. George Clooney is as charming as ever and he has his equal in Vera Farmiga. Their characters are wonderful together and both performers look like they're having a lot of fun. They could have made a really nice romantic-comedy about Ryan and Vera just by themselves. Anna Kendrick as the professionally and personally naïve Natalie is a great prism through which the strengths and weaknesses of Ryan and Vera's lifestyle can be seen and examined. Being the third wheel in a script in never an easy role, but Natalie is more than a servant to the Almighty Plot Hammer.
The film's examination of what it means to people when they lose their job is also a welcome perspective. The wrenching, defeating and humiliating experience of being fired is conveyed through real people who were actually laid off, talking to the camera as through they were speaking to the person who fired them. Into that genuine pain, the fictional character of Ryan is introduced and he is exactly the sort of person you'd want to be the one telling you you're out of a job. Ryan talks to these people about how losing their job is an opportunity to do something better with their lives. And here's the important thing, the movie shows us that both Ryan and the people he's firing know that the "opportunity spiel" is a load of BS...but that in that BS is a kernel of truth. All Ryan can offer is cold comfort and he truly wants it to be the best comfort he can offer, but he also maintains a professional distance. He's like a surgeon who's performing a dangerous but necessary operation and can't let the death of a patient emotionally derail him and stop him from doing his job.
For all of the good, though, Up In The Air crashes and burns at the end when you realize there's not been a point to anything you've just watched. You can literally boil down the entire dramatic and thematic core of this movie into two sentences. They are
1. A man who doesn't want personal relationships changes his mind and wants personal relationships.
2. The End.
I'm not joking. All the humor and social observation in the rest of the film is nothing but decoration for that simplistic and ungratifying gist. This isn't a story about how there's something wrong with Ryan that made him choose a disconnected and solitary existence. Ryan is shown as being perfectly capable of having meaningful relationships. He just starts out not wanting any and then he does. This also isn't a story about how there's something wrong with Ryan's lifestyle, other than that it's unusual for someone his age to enjoy such a peripatetic state of being. It isn't even a story about something being wrong with Ryan's job. There really is no overarching or unifying argument underlying this story. That's not the worst flaw in the world, but it results in an quite entertaining movie finishing in a very unsatisfactory way. When it ended, I felt like there should have been another 15 or 20 minutes left in the film.
Because these filmmakers apparently never considered what this movie was supposed to be about, the audience is left to relish the individual parts of the film without them ever fitting together in any greater way. I like everything about Up In The Air, right up until it left me disappointed and a bit confused. That's a lot more pleasure than you'll get out of most movies, so I can certainly recommend this film. Just don't expect it to make a lot of sense.