In Up in the Air, George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham who fires people for a living. When bosses are afraid to do the dirty work, the call Bingham's company for some help. A couple of the firing scenes play out with professional actors like J.K. Simmons (Schilinger from Oz) or Zach Galifinakis on the receiving end. But when some average looking, non-actors (well, they seem non-actors) get the bad news, it's devastating stuff. These are documentary-like sequences of people talking directly into the camera, their reactions ranging from stunned silence to resignation. Against Clooney's stoic coolness, these sequences stick out. The first thing you think about watching them is the loss of income, the survival mode they need to go into. But what's really going on here, what is really saddening is the termination of a relationship, the end of a homeostasis that for some of these people has lasted decades. One of them compares it to a death in the family, his company being the family, him being the dead guy. Bingham sells the termination as new beginnings, so it makes sense that much of the film takes place in an airport terminal (Bingham main personal goal in life is to acquire 10 million frequent flyer miles). The airport is all about reunions and new starts (i.e. arrivals), separations and new ends (i.e. departures). The in-between everyday life takes place in more banal places like home and at the office. Bingham prefers his nomadic lifestyle precisely because it keeps him from those places and the everyday being-in-the-world. His life, much to the horror of his go-getter apprentice Natalie (Anna Kendrick), doesn't include any substantial relationships with family or friends. And it doesn't include any real romance. The film, though, doesn't do the conventional thing and condemn Bingham for his arrested development. All around him, people are in relationships that are pretty tenuous. His older sister is separated from her husband. His younger sister is set to get married, but her groom-to-be gets has some doubts the day of, idea of a banal family life followed by death seems pointless. Natalie gets dumped by her boyfriend, for whom she threw away everything and moved to Nebraska. Throughout, people keep criticizing Bingham for his intimacy-free life yet they all come off naive. Natalie tries to sell him on marriage, but all she can come up with, argument-wise, is love and not dying alone. "Everyone dies alone," Bingham replies, citing his grandparents' and parents' lonely retirement-home ends. Of course, when Bingham meets fellow nomad Alex ("I'm like you, but with a vagina") and the film seems to move toward a happy romantic ending, you can't help but cheer. As naive as everyone around Bingham seems, that naivete seems pretty universal. Here, people are losing their jobs partly because technology is making them obsolete. Technology, too, plays a big role on the personal end. Natalie gets dumped over text. Bingham sends romantic notes over BBM and schedules dates on his outlook. Towards the end of the film, Natalie even spurs some wholesale changes at work: they try doing firings over webcam, making Bingham’s personal approach obsolete. In Up in the Air, there’s an obvious economic recession, but a sadder recession of human connection underneath it all.
