George Clooney in a role we can relate

Rating: 9/10 (8 February 2010)

George Clooney regularly plays that guy many of us secretly wish we were: suave, well-groomed, handsome, charismatic, confident - in other words, the Oceans Eleven Clooney - or for that matter, simply that general image we have of George Clooney with those aforementioned qualities, devoid of any discernible weaknesses or personality flaws. Certainly he has also played roles where he is paranoid, troubled, even 'kooky', but regardless of the odd exception which has seen him gaining weight or growing a beard for certain parts, there's that marked disconnection between the audience and him and his characters - where its particularly difficult to even picture him wearing anything other than a suit or even just with a different hairstyle. In fact I've often wondered whether he's been 'doing a Hugh Grant' this whole time by simply playing himself in most of his parts - where the on-screen Clooney is almost inseparable from his celebrity persona.
In Up in the Air it comes as no surprise when he initially appears to fit the bill again - a sharply dressed, handsome, confident, silver- tongued devil. But as we delve deeper into this character of Ryan Bingham - a 'corporate downsizing expert' who has prioritised professionalism and self preservation above all else and has micromanaged to a clockwork efficiency every little last detail of his working life spent mainly at airports and within planes and hotel rooms and who is, as a result, completely detached from remorse and emotional reality - we see something we haven't seen before; the polar opposite of what George Clooney stands for and what that overall image of George Clooney is. A vulnerable human being.
Bingham comes across as very similar to the character of Nick Naylor in Thank You For Smoking, also directed by Jason Reitman, the former a professional firer of people with zero empathy and the latter a pro- tobacco spokesperson, the both of them unscrupulous champions of capitalism who we ought to really hate but somehow, through those innate snake-like charms of theirs, manage to win us over with a surprising likability. The main difference between them is that in Up in the Air we catch a glimpse of the life Bingham has left behind and the pain caused by the ramifications of his choices, concealed behind that all- too-familiar smiling Clooney exterior.
This is a film many of us can relate to. It deals with the pursuit of a career and the security of a salary versus the dreams that may not pay off and which we may well never achieve. It explores the trade-off between excelling in what you need to do and not doing the best you can in what you want to do, and vice-versa. We are confronted with that awful fear in the back our minds that there is an extremely high probability that our lives will probably not turn out the way we wished, and how powerless we are to truly prevent ourselves from harm. We see human fragility in the face of love and pride, where a compromise needs to be made and where something usually needs to be sacrificed.
All of these worries are present in the characters in Up in the Air: dreamers and cynics, sometimes a bit of both. Bingham's love interest in the film, Alex, shares the almost exact same lifestyle but ends up affecting him profoundly. The young hotshot Natalie Keener believes in true love and the importance of seeking it, refusing to even imagine life without it and disagreeing with Bingham's outlook and the emotionless prerequisites of the horrible nature of their work. These characters impart their beliefs on one another, but the one who 'learns' the most from it is Ryan Bingham who, as a downsizer whose life philosophy all along has been to reduce the load of his own emotional baggage while reaching his life target of 50 million frequent flyer miles, eventually comes to terms with the harsh reality that he has, consequently, made redundant his own opportunities of truly living. The scene where he is required to give a potential future brother-in-law advice on the importance of marriage - a decision he has up until then personally staunchly opposed - exposes a hypocrisy he can't help but self-deprecatingly acknowledge and yet, through this, we feel a strange empathy for him, a character who is seemingly heartless, and see how even the most rock-hard stubbornness can still be swayed. Bingham is heartbroken in the end, but the fact that his heart was able to be broken at all really solidifies his character.
And that's what really got me in this movie. Far from being depressing, there is a hope that's revealed through Ryan Bingham: the moment he accepts the flaws of his own beliefs and comes to terms with the pure fact that life cannot be lived alone coincides with the audience's discovery that, instead of constantly being that guy we wanted to be, this time round George Clooney is playing the guy who kind of reminds us of ourselves. We might not have that exact same external charm or the trademark grey hair or display such confidence in public speaking but inside, we all feel the same things, and that's what makes Up in the Air hit home so convincingly and accessibly on a human level.