Life is clutter to Bingham, and the more one can get rid of it, the happier one is. His philosophy -- expounded in occasional bleak hotel conference room seminars he gives on the metaphorical question, 'What's In Your Backpack?' (Answer? Too much stuff, empty it) -- is a kind of shallow Buddhism perfectly calibrated for the age of reduced benefits, job insecurity and outsourcing. Delivering his speeches in a friendly cadence with that slight Clooney grin, not pacing the stage and shouting like some Tony Robbins wannabe, Bingham's admonition to leave it all behind (family, houses, relationships) and jump clear into a world of constant travel and looking forward could definitely appeal to those eager middle managers in the audience. 'Make no mistake,' Bingham says, 'moving is living.'
Of course, Bingham's purportedly joyful life is a lie, glossed as it is with so many engaging distractions. (A certain kind of travel-nerd viewer will thrill at the movie's discussion of various car-rental brands, elite mileage programs, and the best ways for swiftly navigating airport security.) Director and co-writer Jason Reitman ensures that the film is filled with uncomfortably direct soliloquies from the newly fired, a litany of tired-eyed people pleading, 'What am I going to do now?' These are the ghosts of Bingham's life, the wrecked lives that he wants to dump behind him as so much extra clutter. Needless to say, they will come back to haunt him.
Based on Walter Kirn's 2003 novel, Reitman and Sheldon Turner's screenplay opens up the original story, mostly for the better. They add in Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a peppy little overachieving Stanford grad trying to get Bingham's boss (played with particularly unctuous zeal by Jason Bateman) to ground all his traveling termination counselors and do everything via webcast. In a last-ditch attempt to hang on to his treasured (and suddenly fragile) lifestyle, Bingham ends up squiring Natalie on his rounds around the country, showing her the ropes. It's a clever way to illustrate the grueling daily processes of Bingham's job, into which Kirn rarely delved.
Along the way, Bingham fires up one more of his occasional, see-you-when-I-see-you romances, this time with a woman who appears to be his gender-opposite equal. Vera Farmiga plays Alex Goran, a fun, cynical, up-for-anything sort who just might be the coolest woman on the planet. Although their lives are supposedly compatible only in that neither wants any sort of weighing-down solidity or regularity, it's clear -- particularly in one exquisitely timed comic scene where the two counsel a newly heartbroken Natalie -- that Bingham is quickly falling deeply in love with Alex. It's an odd courtship, simultaneously carnal and chummy, but utterly affecting and quite possibly the best thing in the film.
Reitman tries mightily hard to update Kirn's novel to an even more economically fragile time, bringing the haunting specter of unemployment and its attendant emotional devastation front and center. Where Up in the Air runs into problems is not in this attempt, or with any of its top-notch performers, but in how it tries to marry that bleakness with its sense of humor. There are many easy jokes here, and they don't always jibe well with the recurrent spectacle of Bingham and Natalie's interviewees getting their lives cut apart one after the other. The filmmakers' desire to smooth the edges of their story is understandable. But in working overtime to show how these hard-bitten road warriors crack wise to make it through their day, they end up letting the audience off the hook as well.
That's one way to get up there.
