Living on a Jet Plane

“Up in the Air” is another one of director Jason Reitman’s studies in how far a movie can go with the right characters to occupy it – considering the barebones story that everybody here has to work with, it seems right that they’d be interesting enough to carry the film by themselves without having their lives decorated with special effects or wild plot twists. That formula is employed more successfully in some films than in others (it works much better in Reitman’s “Juno” than it does in “Thank You for Smoking”), but “Up in the Air” might be the best example of why Reitman likes it so much.

The film’s hero leads a life that seems empty and routine, although he claims that he’s as happy as a clam. George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, who travels all over the United States to let people know they’ve been fired when their employers don’t have the guts to do it. He’s pretty good at convincing the unfortunate souls who’ve just been laid off that being unemployed might be a wonderful opportunity for them: Maybe, just maybe, there are bigger things waiting for them in the near future.

Ryan, on the other hand, doesn’t see how his life could get better than this. He gets to spend 322 days a year in hotels and planes, and feels more at home on the road than he does in his Omaha apartment. That might be what attracts him to a woman named Alex (Vera Farmiga), another frequent flier who he flirts with at a bar. They inevitably retire to Ryan’s hotel room, but Alex assures him that she’s not a one-night stand, and says that they’ll meet again when their paths coincide later in Florida.

Back at Ryan’s office, his boss (Jason Bateman) tells him how optimistic he is about a new way for the company to do business, cooked up by a strategist named Natalie (Anna Kendrick). Instead of spending countless dollars on airfare and hotels for employees, she argues that it’d be cheaper to do the whole thing on the Internet. Ryan complains that using a Web cam to fire people just isn’t right, which gives his boss the idea to partner him up with Natalie on the road to give each of them a sense of how the other thinks. Ryan isn’t too thrilled about bringing a partner along to watch him work, and as if that weren’t enough, he still has to prepare for his sister’s (Melanie Lynskey) wedding. Why anyone would want to walk down the aisle is totally beyond him.

At this point, we’ve got a setup that can go any which way, but the storyline only drives this movie so far. The rest of the film is in the hands of the actors, and not only do they know how their characters think, but they understand how fate can transform them into different people. What happens when Ryan gets more than he bargained for out of his long-distance relationship with Alex? How about when a sure-footed girl like Natalie learns that her boyfriend back home is breaking up with her? Or when the wedding that Ryan’s supposed to go to is endangered when the groom (Danny McBride) starts having second thoughts? Sure, the film manages to get some laughs out of all this (to be sure, “Up in the Air” has its fair share of them), but this is a movie that respects its characters enough to give them the dignity that they deserve, and it’s sincerely interested in the way that their lives change.

What’s funny about this film is that although it’s about ordinary people, it has some familiar faces at its disposal who turn up whenever the movie wants to switch gears – even though comic actors like McBride and J.K. Simmons have dramatic roles, they each manage to get a laugh just by being onscreen. Some of them are even deliberately funny, like Zach Galifianakis as an employee who dreams up eccentric revenge fantasies when he hears that he’s being let go.

Most of the people Ryan has to deal with don’t take the news any better, and as good as he is at assuring them it isn’t the end of the world, the film understands that it doesn’t work to put a happy face on all of this. (A great deal of the people portraying the employees are real-life Americans who’ve recently been laid off.) It’s kind of like the flipside of “Slumdog Millionaire,” which probably got as much attention as it did by giving audiences a rosy picture in the face of a recession. The timing for that film couldn’t have been any better, but Hollywood has had a chance to catch up with everyone else – it’s a little funny that a movie with a title like “Up in the Air” is more down-to-earth than most of the stuff that’s playing at a theater near you.