Up in the Air

Frequent flier smiles: As he travels to downsize, Clooney finds romance ‘Up in the Air’

December 04, 2009|Wesley Morris, Globe Staff

Ryan Bingham, the protagonist of Jason Reitman’s warm, smoothly made comedy “Up in the Air,’’ is another of George Clooney’s playboy loners. They live inside a membrane of narcissism until some force - be it love or justice - attempts to break in.

In “Up in the Air,’’ the membrane is punctured early. Ryan works for a consulting firm that companies hire to reduce their staff. The firm is thinking of cutting back itself. Ryan’s boss - played by Jason Bateman, doing unctuous as only he can, like a 21st-century Dabney Coleman - has brought in a sharp young woman named Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) to slash the company’s travel budget by 85 percent. With her giant ponytail, power suits, and ludicrous lexicon (“glocal’’ is her term for “global’’ and “local’’), she’s like a corporate warrior sent from a business-school hatchery. Even her toothy smile is a kind of occupational armor.

Natalie’s big idea is to fire people over video chats, so the consulting staff rarely has to leave its home base in Omaha. The announcement floors Ryan. Worse, he’s been instructed to take this high-efficiency robot on the road with him. Sitting at a meeting with a dozen or so co-workers, he looks sick. We feel his pain. Very liberally adapted from Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, the movie presents the entire corporate travel galaxy (Kirn called it Airworld) as a rarefied resort.

Ryan travels the way Roger Federer plays tennis. “To know me is to fly with me,’’ he tells us. The object of Ryan’s desire is not a woman (those are among the perks). He’s in pursuit of 10 million frequent flier miles on American Airlines.

At its best, “Up in the Air’’ invents new realms for old Hollywood sophistication. The sequined cocktail festivities and crack banter are now happening in the Admirals Club lounge and at corporate blowouts where everyone parties while wearing a name badge. And Reitman’s team captures it all expertly: Editor Dana E. Glauberman makes shockingly sleek work of packing and wielding roller bags, while cinematographer Eric Steelberg sexes up America’s hotel bars.

This wholly artificial world exists on the once-bloated underbelly of the dot-com bubble. In a way, it even predicts the post-apocalyptic space colonies of “WALL-E.’’ But in this lousy economy, it all feels glamorous. And never more so than when Clooney spies Vera Farmiga nursing a drink at an airport bar.