Comedy of Air

Up in the Air is one of those movies that comes along every once in a while and asks you to feel sorry for someone who is living a life of joyous irresponsibility. Like Frank Sinatra in The Tender Trap and Come Blow Your Horn, or Warren Beatty in Shampoo, George Clooney in Up in the Air is happily and breezily floating through his days. He has broken the code of the modern American traveler and knows everything about how to get through an airport quickly, how to get the best seats on planes, how to zip through security and the check-in line at any hotel, and how to crash a really fun party. He doesn’t want to be tied down, he doesn’t want to be connected, he doesn’t want anything but the life he has.

And so, of course, his pleasure must be exposed as shallow, his goals as meaningless, his amusements as unworthy. We must come to pity him, because if we don’t, we might actually want to be him, and that would be bad. Frank Sinatra’s bachelor paradise in The Tender Trap must be invaded and destroyed by Debbie Reynolds’s perky actress possessed of no ambition but to marry and move to the suburbs. The same with Sinatra’s almost identical bachelor paradise in Come Blow Your Horn, which he must surrender to win the respect of his father, who considers him a bum. And George, the promiscuous hairdresser cutting a swath through Beverly Hills in Shampoo, must stand alone and lonely as the only woman he has ever loved—who is a complete tramp, by the way—drives off to marry the 30-years-older man whose mistress she has been.

This odd sub-genre drinks deep from the well of male fantasy, the fantasy of liberation from bourgeois care, and then gets on its high horse. Because, after all, no human being can live in such a fashion! It is just wrong! Having created a vision of easy living that doesn’t exist in the first place, these movies smash it to bits, thus (in theory) making us feel better about our drab, humdrum lives.

No such person as Ryan Bingham, the character George Clooney plays in Up in the Air, actually exists anywhere on this earth. Mid-forties, unencumbered by ex-wives or children or parents, effortlessly at ease and impossibly good-looking as only George Clooney can be, Ryan is a poster child for the good life just so long as he is not at home in his featureless Omaha apartment.

He was originally conceived by Walter Kirn in the wonderful satirical novel of the same name published in 2001 (and which I reviewed for this magazine). Kirn was writing about the breezy world of American business during the ’90s gold rush, as personified by Ryan, a consultant who happily spends most of his time in a place Kirn called AirWorld, reading can-do tomes, collecting frequent-flyer miles, and avoiding the remonstrances of his family.

Kirn’s satirical portrait lost its altitude a few months later after the September 11 attacks; one of the consequences of those attacks is that the pleasures to be found in AirWorld are not what they once were. Nor is the business culture after the economic meltdown the transmitter of sunny platitudes it was at the time when Kirn wrote his novel. 

As a result, Jason Reitman’s acclaimed movie has to find a newly relevant take on Ryan Bingham, and it does so by turning him into an executioner. He is now a consultant who travels the country firing white-collar workers so their bosses don’t have to. The dappled breeziness of Kirn’s book gives way to the fluorescent bleakness of Reitman’s portrayal of listless, hopeless middle-management America—a featureless series of office parks with featureless offices in featureless flyover cities.

The general critical consensus has been that Up in the Air offers a wonderfully compassionate view of the new economic nightmare, but it struck me as a work of almost limitless condescension, a portrayal of an America in which Omaha is the same as Kansas City is the same as Des Moines.

Ryan’s life is thrown into crisis when his firm begins to play with a new system of firing people over broadband—doing so through a computer terminal, so that it won’t have to pay Ryan’s travel bills. This means Ryan will have to spend his days in the home office in Omaha, which is his idea of hell on earth.

The distance-firing bit is Reitman’s effort (along with screenwriter Sheldon Turner) to work in some of Kirn’s biz-world satire, but it makes no sense. Since we’re told in the movie’s first few minutes that Bingham is brought in because bosses are too cowardly to can their employees, how could his firm even consider such a plan?

The movie’s tone is uncertain, veering between heightened parody and documentary realism. Some critics are taking the uncertainty for complexity, but the satire isn’t especially funny and the realism isn’t especially believable. That is particularly true when it comes to Ryan’s own emotional awakening at the hands of a sultry woman he meets in a hotel bar and whose company he secures to attend his sister’s wedding in the pathetic home town in Wisconsin he has been fleeing from all his life.

Ryan falls in love with the sultry woman, though not for any real reason other than that the schematic plot devised by Reitman and Turner demands it, and then, instantly, he is no longer happy skating through life. He even loses faith in the corporate self-help mantra he’s been trying to market and walks off the stage in the middle of a speech in Las Vegas in a scene that is a bizarre plagiarism of an earlier Clooney comedy misfire, Intolerable Cruelty (and an occurrence that would never, ever happen in real life). Being free of encumbrance is gall and wormwood to him.

Up in the Air doesn’t really attempt to be a credible portrait of anything. It is, rather, intended to be a vision of the Way We Live Now. And in its hopeless autumnal gloom, maybe it does succeed at that. But it can only do so by taking its happy-go-lucky protagonist and turning him into just another Sad Sack for his own good. Up in the Air is a buzzkill.

John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard’s movie critic.