Totally and Completely a Film About 2009

Rating: 9/10 (1 May 2010)

Up in the Air, if nothing else, is totally and completely a film for our time. It takes the dependence people once had on their jobs and replaces it with a teetering insecurity. George Clooney's Ryan Bingham is the company yes-man for the 2000s. He never comes to the office. Indeed, he doesn't have an office, he has a headquarters where his boss has an office. His life is spent traveling to other people's offices, and firing them. Bingham identifies himself as a Termination Facilitator. He fires people for a living. When corporations must cut back immediately yet don't like being the bad guy, he flies in and plays the bad guy to the new ex-workers. In economic decline, his enterprise is booming! But eventually, the detachment of the road life is jeopardized by the dawns of firing by Web chat. It may not be as affable as firing someone face to face, however it conserves a lot of money on airfare.
This isn't a comedy. Nor is it a tragedy. It's an alert observation of how people in 2009 do their jobs. Bingham adores his profession. He doesn't want a home. He doesn't want a family. He orates self-help speeches on how and why to unpack the backpack of your life. Clooney plays Bingham as one of those people you know yet you never break the ice. They endure all the motions, and make all the appropriate overtures, and you're "friends," yet who's in there? There are two women in Bingham's life. Vera Farmiga plays another commercial traveler, and for some time they've been having rendezvous in lifeless "Suite" hotels, eating, having sex, pretending to be the happy couple neither one will go in on. Anna Kendrick, who was terrific in the 2007 buried gem Rocket Science, here plays a promising, driven new graduate who has acquired an opening at Bingham's company as it's close to her boyfriend. Bingham takes her on the road to show her the business. Farmiga is him now, Kendrick is him then.
You probably won't peg all that Farmiga is thinking. Kendrick's character is bursting with such liveliness at the advent of her career that it radiates even on the departures of others'. Nothing better than pleasing your employer. The movie's strongest scenes by far involve Farmiga or Kendrick. Farmiga is so completely real and becoming that everything she says is worlds better than anyone else would probably put it in as little time and words and with as little effort as her. And the scene where Clooney puts Kendrick on the spot and tells her to fire him while he fires one hypothetical curveball question after another is pitch-perfect in its razor-sharp and rapid-fire reminiscence of a classic Howard Hawks picture.
I like how Reitman begins with the way corporations rationalize degenerate methods and then administer their justifications with seamless coherence. That approach was at the heart of his exceptional debut, Thank You for Smoking. Reitman also made the cute but phenomenally overrated Juno. With these three films at the outset of his career, we can just wonder what's coming up. He makes clever, subversive commercial films. That's more of a challenge than making clever, subversive art-house films.