Up in the Air, and the meaning of work

 

The plot of Up in the Air (directed by  Joel Reitman, 2009) can be told in one sentence. A commercial traveller, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) who spends his life on the road claims to be happy and has a non-committal fling with a fellow frequent traveller, Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga); when he decides in the middle of a speaking engagement to visit her home to declare his love, he discovers she is married with children – something she hadn’t mentioned. 

Put like that, it’s a minor-key romantic comedy that could have been directed by Douglas Sirk. But the film is considerably more than that, with three additional subplots that make the story far more complex. 

First, the movie presents us with a picture of family life that is by no means rosy. Bingham visits his sister for her wedding, and the event is mundane, the people uncharismatic, and the location uninspiring. Would you abandon the high-flying life for this? Worse, the groom gets cold feet, and Bingham, of all people, is enlisted to persuade him to go through with the wedding. 

Second, Clooney’s job is not just any job. His job is to fire people; we see a haunting series of cameos of people who have just been told they have been fired (the director got real-life people to talk about their experience, and these clips looks uncomfortably authentic). By a strange twist, Clooney himself is effectively fired later in the movie: he is told that his role has been replaced by online conference calls. The experience of being told he is superfluous has a dramatic effect on his earlier unshakeable confidence about his nomadic life. 

Third, Bingham is accompanied for much of the film by a young new employee, Natalie Keener, full of ideals and inexperience, who has all the romantic dreams that Clooney doesn’t have. 

Ryan Bingham: [on the docks in Miami] You know that moment when you look into somebody's eyes and you can feel them staring into your soul and the whole world goes quiet just for a second?

Natalie Keener: Yes.

Ryan Bingham: [shrugs] Right. Well, I don't. 

In other words, unlike most Hollywood plots, this is not a simple decision. But what makes it a great film is that Clooney misreads the signals; he gets it wrong. At the end of the film, he bet on his carefree partner being sufficiently keen on him to commit to living with him; he didn’t realise that she was, as she states to him quite openly, “the woman you don’t have to worry about … just think of my as yourself, only with a vagina”. 

How did we get here? A Hollywood feel-good comedy, starring George Clooney, with a magnificent, photogenic face, named by People magazine as the sexiest man alive, used by the Coen Brothers as a figure of fun in Burn after Reading and Hail, Caesar, suddenly becomes dark and confronts the world of work. Why do we work? What do we really value? What do we want to come home to? In the last few scenes, Bingham is awarded his coveted airline loyalty card, after flying ten million miles with them. But by the time he wins it, the award is meaningless. This is a remarkable, disturbing film that you continue to think about days after seeing it, all the more powerful for moving beyond the initial seemingly light-hearted introduction. It’s a performance worthy of Mastroianni at his best.