We’re All Up in the Air

Recently, Peter Worthington wrote a terrific FrumForum spot on the deserved glories of the first truly great movie about the War on Terror, the Best Picture-winner The Hurt Locker.  I bow to no one in my admiration for Kathryn Bigelow’s nail-biting, forehead-perspiring visceral technique and the acting of Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and the amazing Brian Geraghty.  And my voice is very much in the cheering section for her stereotype-shattering win as Best Director.  But with all due respect to Oscar, in this critic’s opinion, the “best picture” of 2009 was Jason Reitman’s considerably altered (and for the better) adaptation of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, Up in the Air.   And while Up in the Air isn’t as overtly political as a movie about the Iraq War and its aftereffects, in many ways, it’s the most politically and culturally relevant film of this year, and several years before it.

For those who haven’t seen the movie (and what are you waiting for?), it tells the story of Ryan Bingham, a veteran “efficiency expert”, who spent his career dreaming up strategies and plans for companies to shear off the fat, and now works for a ”transition” consulting firm that CEOs too cowardly to do their own dirty work “outsource” the painful job of firing excess employees to.  Ryan is an equal-opportunity unemployer — he’ll fire black and white, Latino and Asian, gay and straight, “Erin Brockovich” working moms and snooty yuppies, youngsters just starting out and helpless seniors who wanted to stay just long enough to qualify for their pension.  And though we know better (and so does he), he superficially seems to love his life of airport and hotel lounges, rented cars, coin-op washers and dryers, stale cookies, and breaking the “Ten Million Mile” mark in air travel.

And there you have the movie’s big twist — this efficiency expert, this “corporate killer”, is the lead character, the HERO of this executioner’s song.   The one women and gay men are supposed to be attracted to. The one men are supposed to want to enjoy hanging out with.   The one we’re supposed to like. The one we’re supposed to identify with.

To grasp just how subversive Reitman’s approach is, try to imagine Up in the Air being made 15 or 20 years ago, when the height of American film was represented by Oliver Stone, Michael Moore, and Spike Lee, when the top TV shows were the likes of Married with Children and Roseanne (on which George Clooney got one of his early breaks). Talented and emotionally manipulative filmmakers like the above would have made Ryan Bingham into a cartoon of the running-dog capitalist lackey; a caricature, not a character.  If Paddy Chayevsky or Norman Lear had written the movie, it would have surely ended with Clooney suffering a fatal heart attack in one of his desolated hotel rooms, going face-down in his expired underwear and frequent-flier shirts, or just biting the dust of his ever-present laptop.  Or better yet – some heroic woman whom he’d fired and tossed aside might just finally blow him away, just like JR Ewing on Dallas.  As the audience cheered.

While in no way does the movie condone the excesses of corporate greed or make apologies for the harrowing feeling that impersonal, motiveless rejection inflicts on the rejected’s psyche, what makes the movie great, rather than just good, is that Reitman knows that he couldn’t take that kind of preachy-teachy, didactic straw-man approach  anymore, even if he wanted to.  And that’s because today — whether we want to or not — most of us can identify all too well with what it’s like to be Ryan Bingham.

As played by the quintessentially charming George Clooney in his best big-screen work, Ryan isn’t a sadist who gets his rocks off by cheap bullying and dominance — not a Dick Cheney or a Rahm Emanuel.  Instead, he’s a handsome yet allergic-to-commitment Everyman, pushing fifty if he hasn’t already pushed past it, who realizes that his chance for the kind of mom-dad-kids Brady Bunch family that his cousins are looking forward to has pretty much passed him by.  He gets one final shot at the brass ring courtesy of surrogate daughter Anna Kendrick and lusty lover Vera Farmiga — but even then, he knows it IS his last shot.

In a recent interview, legendary star Angie Dickinson said that in her day, “social networking” met that someone was having a really great party.  Today it means that “you’re snuggled up cozy next to a computer.”  Instead of meeting face-to-face in singles’ bars, concerts, gyms, and bookstores, people hook up on Facebook and Twitter and Match.com, placing their order for Mr. / Ms. Right (or all of the above).  THEN they go to the jazz club or the gay bar or the movies — as trial-order couples, jealously guarding each other’s private property.  That’s just Ryan Bingham’s style. Or conversely, we hit the clubs and the concerts in groups, like the Sex and the City gals and the Desperate Housewives.  Strength in numbers — the very antithesis of Ryan’s lone-wolf aesthetic.

At work, it’s just the same.  If we’re in middle management, whether white-collar consultant or factory foreman, we have probably been in the same sordid situations that represent just another day at the office for Ryan.  “I didn’t want to have to downsize him, but if I didn’t, I might have ended up on the receiving end of the pink slip myself!”  “I don’t like that policy, but when I make a complaint, my boss says in her best Judge Judy impersonation, ‘I don’t answer your questions — you answer my questions!’”  Rejection has become the constant drip-drip-drip of today’s society.  Nondescript bloggers who think they can write a book or screenplay getting a reality check from agents and story editors;  young men and women following the latest contestants on The Biggest Loser as they try to make the former score on “Hot Or Not” dot com, people being “un-Friended” on Friendster and Facebook for this crime or that.  Not to mention the family living in their car this year when they were in their pre-foreclosure family home last year.

The late Penelope Gilliatt said, in a notorious pan of In the Heat of the Night, that as important as racial reconciliation was, she couldn’t buy the movie’s moral of “can’t we all just get along.”  “I can think of no truly first-rate work of art or literature that isn’t dedicated to the fact that we are all inconsolably alone” at the end of the day.  Up in the Air is a first-rate work of filmmaking that isn’t afraid to come out of the closet and tumble to that very fact.  That in our era of multi-culti “diversity awareness”, of ex-boyfriends and girlfriends stalking us on our cell phones, of dissatisfied clients muckraking through our Facebook or Myspace page or sending us nasty emails, of TiVos, iPods, and Tweeters that turn the act of maintaining friendship into a time-management triage worthy of Clooney’s own ER, we may be more inconsolably alone and alienated than ever.  That as “open” and “tolerant” as we are on the outside — we’re pushing other people away 24-7 on the inside.

The poster for Up in the Air, with George Clooney and suitcase in the middle of an airport, was one of the most iconic of the past year.  It also tells the whole story of Ryan Bingham in a nutshell – a burnt-out, forty-five or fifty-year-old, Irish Catholic from the Midwest, caught in the traffic of pain and confusion, looking up to a God who may or may not be there anymore, wondering which way to go before the end.  And though we might want to, we can’t hate him, or even feel the cheap thrill of feeling superior to or sorry for him.

Because to some degree or another, we have all become Ryan Bingham.  And he has become us.