Up in the Air

RATING: ****

Ryan Bingham (Clooney) believes he has it all sorted out. He makes a living firing people — for companies who don’t want to dirty their hands — but lives with it in the belief that he takes those laid-off to the point where they can see “very dim hope”. Plus,he loves all that comes with his job — flying around the country to firms that hire his services,and the “privileged customer” status that allows him to breeze past queues at airports and hotels. Ryan’s goal is a particular frequent-flier-miles figure that he keeps a guilty but not guarded secret.

Then a few things happen. Ryan meets a woman who is him,watches a girl becoming him,and faces a sister who will never be anything like him. A man who gives “What you have in your backpack” talks — telling young delegates to shed the baggage of things and relationships — finds himself lugging along in his suitcase a cardboard cutout of his sister and her fiancé. The couple,who are about to get married,want their friends and family to photograph the cutout against places they have never been. Here is a man,for whom places have come to mean only the miles they notch up,holding in his hands the dreams of two people wanting to experience those cities,if only in cardboard.

And that’s only one way in which Up in the Air holds up a mirror to Ryan. Consider the woman he meets at the hotel bar,Alex (an excellent Farmiga),who tells him,“I’m you with a vagina.” He likes her,she likes him; they dance,spend a romantic evening on a boat out at sea; and while her business involves the same amount of travel as Ryan’s,they discover there are other things they have in common. Ryan takes the next big step,inviting Alex to his sister’s wedding,she accepts,including a trip to the school he went to. However,who is to say that as they drift closer,they may also be growing apart.

And then there is Natalie (Kendrick),a fresh graduate from Cornell,who has ideas of revolutionising how Ryan’s company does its business. One of her first projects is to take the firing pep-talk online,which would mean an end to life as Ryan knows it. He rebels at the idea of spending more than “40 lonely days in a year at home (a one-room apartment in Ohama)”,and takes her on a guided tour of how firing is done in his world. At the end of the road trip,both realise they were wrong: she about not dirtying her hands,he about keeping his conscience clean. He starts out as the one giving advice,ends up taking it.

The three have an interesting conversation about life choices,where Natalie says she is “happy with what women like Alex have done for my generation”,but feels she is not wrong to want both career and love. Alex says by the time she is her age,“settling” for less stops feeling like that.

If Reitman’s last film Juno was about two kids who were different without feeling the need to be,Up in the Air is about people who realise that normal isn’t all that bad — or sometimes all that easy. What makes one different from the other is the companionship they can find.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com