George Clooney portrays Ryan Bingham in a scene from Up in the Air
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So Clooney is the Danny Ocean of canids, with the complication of paternity. The family vibe here is as tense as in earlier films by Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) and Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) but with a stalwart, creative dad who will somehow make things right. There's a similarly fruitful tension between the movie's hip, careless tone and the painstakingly retro stop-motion technique. The result is not a collision but a concerto and, for audiences, harmonic bliss.
Clooney, Airborne
The man can do goofy, he can do suave, and in dramas like Syriana, for which he won an Oscar, he can seem close to emotional exhaustion. Up in the Air, which has already been named the year's best film by the National Board of Review, takes him in a new direction, one that may be closer to his core: a self-sufficient man who doesn't want to be tied down. His Ryan Bingham is a management consultant hired by the bosses at large companies to tell their employees they're no longer employed. And he does so with such ostensible sympathy that the victims often leave the interview without wanting to kill him. He's a head chopper who comes off as a grief counselor. The real villains are the bosses who don't have the guts to fire people face to face.
What's gutsy is that writer-director Jason Reitman (adapting Walter Kirn's novel) is springing a movie about a toxic social problem at a time when more than a tenth of the workforce is out of a job. Moreover, Reitman hired a few dozen unemployed nonactors to play the parts of staffers who get the hook. These folks aren't performing; they're bleeding on camera.
Yet Up in the Air is not primarily an issue movie, banging home its thesis on the anvil of melodrama. It's closer to a romantic comedy. Ryan finds a kindred spirit in another high-flying exec, the sultry Alex (Vera Farmiga). As she tells Ryan, "Think of me as yourself, only with a vagina." Their relationship is affectionate, lusty and unfettered--the perfect sky alliance. It's a life Ryan loves: the pampering by flight attendants, the plush anonymity of hotel rooms. What you might call loneliness, he calls self-reliance. This is threatened by a young corporate rival (Anna Kendrick), who wants to save money by reining in the flyboys and firing people by Skype. Suddenly Ryan, by contrast, is almost a mensch.
The film doesn't pass judgment on its characters; nobody's forced into redemption. And Clooney responds to this maturity with the most nuanced performance of his career. He gets inside Ryan because, in a way, he already lives there: he too is a traveling man with an aversion to commitment. Clooney has always ridden high on the confidence that people will buy anything he pitches--even a savory comedy-drama with a tart undertaste. Odds are that the great salesman's work in Up in the Air will create, among audiences and Oscar voters alike, a lot of satisfied customers.