Downsize this

You don’t want to feel bad for Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney with almost unbearable smugness at the start of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air. He’s a corporate hatchet man — or, as the jargon goes, a “career transition counselor.” He flies around America, firing people face to face for a living. He racks up millions of frequent flier miles and has a special card that allows him access to the best airport lounges, best car rental service, and best hotel freebies in the land. He knows how to pack light, lining up behind Asians at x-ray machines in airports (“They pack light, travel efficiently, and they have a thing for slip on shoes. Gotta love ‘em.”). He hovers 36,000 feet above the economic gloom of a downsized America like a jovial Grim Reaper. He even peddles his philosophy of shedding attachments — to things, to jobs, even to people — in a paid motivational seminar titled “How Big Is Your Backpack?”

Sure, flying business class probably helps ease the pain; but one glimpse at Bingham’s plain, featureless one-bedroom apartment tells you why he likes to travel so much: “All the things you probably hate about traveling — the recycled air, the artificial lighting, the digital juice dispensers, the cheap sushi — are warm reminders that I’m home.”

You marvel at Bingham’s gall, facing an about-to-be-axed worker in a conference room, and feeding him this line, meant to inspire downsized workers to move on to the next challenge — sudden redundancy: “Anybody who ever built an empire, or changed the world, sat where you are now. And it’s because they sat there that they were able to do it.”

Yet by the end of Up in the Air, you do feel bad for Ryan Bingham, and the corporate bottom-line culture that forces millions to contemplate “Who moved my cheese?” and scramble around to find the next available crumb. Up in the Air is the most effective snapshot of the American zeitgeist in years, capturing the uncertainty of people suddenly realizing they’ve built their lives on crumbling sand. Reitman (who co-wrote the script from a 2001 novel by Walter Kirn) wisely casts a dozen or so real downsized Americans, and boy, do you feel their pain. They face the camera, explaining how hard it is to tell their kids they’ve been axed, expressing their rage and confusion and helplessness.

It might be the most authentic part of the movie, but this is no Michael Moore documentary; it’s about Ryan Bingham’s crisis, essayed by a charismatic actor who, we all know, will never actually experience such hardship, even if the tables are ironically turned on his character.

Strangely, I thought Up in the Air was going to focus more on the effects of corporate slashing — it does, in graphic but also subtle ways, showing us rooms of empty swivel chairs, empty office spaces, never overselling the point. But downsizing turns out to be a metaphor: something to highlight Bingham’s own personal crisis. It seems he’s traded a life of family attachments, sticky emotions and possible love for frequent flier comfort. His “philosophy” doesn’t see the “value” in marriage, love, children. He glibly outlines this worldview to Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a career transition cohort who has come up with a way to fire people via online chat — a sort of remote control axing — thus saving millions in travel costs for the company. When Bingham points out how difficult it is not to fire someone face to face, his boss has him take her along on his next head-cutting trip, to learn the ropes.

Inside the conference room, no matter what city of America, Bingham is a smooth master, easing each shattered employee to a place of acceptance — or at least acceptance of the separation package he proffers. But speaking to his seminar groups, he takes a much harder line, championing the need to shed all baggage: “The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star-crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.”

The 20-something Ms. Keener is, understandably, devastated by Bingham’s cynicism. They’re the usual odd couple on a road trip, growing to understand one another’s differences. But it’s a nice subtlety of Up in the Air that the usual battle lines — innocence, experience, old, young — are not so clear-cut. The desperation of the times is visible on every character’s face, and it’s a desperation fed on a growing certainty that the old rules don’t apply.

Signs of the zeitgeist are all over Up in the Air, like Natalie’s boyfriend breaking up via text message (“Wow. That’s kind of like getting fired over the Internet,” cracks Bingham). Or the slimy sleazeball boss played by Jason Bateman (who, apparently, after subtle variations on the same role in Reitman’s Juno, State of Play and so many other films, does possess the Slimy Sleazeball Gene). Or the casual relationship Bingham begins with another frequent flier addict, Alex (Vera Farmiga), after they trade peeks at each other’s travel perk cards in an airport bar. (“We’re alike,” she coos. “We’re both turned on by elite status.”)

But Up in the Air mostly hovers above the fray of the shattered lives it wants to reveal to us. After all, to focus the camera on people actually lining up for unemployment enrollment, heading to the welfare office to receive food stamps, or sitting, jobless, in a home that they’re terrified they won’t be able to make payments on in a few months is not the stuff of Hollywood movies. Leave that to the “Best Documentary” Oscar category. No, better to stay with Bingham, as he realizes how his lifestyle choice has isolated him from family, real attachments, love, and purpose in life.

If Reitman had chosen to stay “on the ground” and document the economic slaughter, this would be one frustratingly depressing movie. Instead, he offers a heartbreaking one. As I mentioned, you don’t want to feel bad for Ryan Bingham, but by the end, hurled into his chosen fate, and captured in Clooney’s sad, stony features, you do kind of feel it. Aristotle had a name for it: catharsis. If we, the audience, are to feel the pain of so many others, we need an actor to clarify and purge those emotions within us. A grim-faced Clooney, looking up at the smorgasbord of airline destinations, does the job.