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Ryan Bingham is the Organization Man for the 2000s. He never comes to the office. Technically, he doesn't have an office, he has an address where his employer has an office. His life is devoted to visiting other people's offices, and firing them. “Up in the Air” takes the trust people once had in their jobs and pulls out the rug. It is a film for this time.

Bingham describes himself as a Termination Facilitator. He fires people for a living. When corporations need to downsize quickly but hate the mess, he flies in and breaks the news to the new former employees. In hard times, his business is great.

This isn't a comedy. If it were, it would be hard to laugh in these last days of 2009. Nor is it a tragedy. It's an observant look at how a man does a job. Too many movie characters have jobs involving ruling people, killing them, or going to high school. Bingham loves his work. He doesn't want a home. He doesn't want a family. He gives self-help lectures on how and why to unpack the backpack of your life.

George Clooney plays Bingham as one of those people you meet but never get to know. They go through all the forms, and know all the right moves, and you're “friends,” but — who's in there? At his funeral, people confess they never really knew him. Sitting in a first-class seat one day, asked where he lives, Bingham says, “Here.”

He likes his job because he feels he performs a service. Nobody likes to fire someone. Someone has to. He has protocols. In a curious way, he's like the two Army men in “ The Messenger ,” who notify the next of kin after a soldier is killed. Jason Reitman , the director, auditioned real people who had recently been fired to play some of the fired employees (others are played by actors). He asked them to improvise their words on learning the news. Would you want the job of listening to their pain?

There are two women in Bingham's life. Alex Goran ( Vera Farmiga ) is also a road warrior, and for some time they've been meeting in dreary “Suite” hotels in East Moses, Nowhere — having meals, making love, play-acting at being the happy couple neither one will commit to. Natalie Keener ( Anna Kendrick ) is a bright, ambitious new graduate who has taken a job with Bingham's company because it's near her boyfriend. Bingham takes her on the road to teach her the ropes. Alex is him now, Natalie is him then.

Farmiga is one of the warmest and most attractive women in the movies, or at least she plays one. You may not guess all she's thinking. Kendrick's Natalie is so brim-full of joy at the dawn of her career that it shines even on ending those of others. Nothing better than making your boss happy.

The isolation of the road life is threatened by the introduction of firing by Web chat. This is in-sourcing, if you will. It may not be warmer than firing someone in person, but it saves a lot of money on airfare. Notice how Reitman likes to start with the way corporations justify immoral behavior and then apply their rationalizations with perfect logic. That method was at the core of his brilliant debut, “ Thank You for Smoking ” (2005).

Reitman also made the great “ Juno .” Still only 32, the son of the Canadian producer-director Ivan Reitman (“ Ghostbusters ”), he grew up behind the counter of the family store, so to speak. With these three films at the dawn of his career, we can only imagine what comes next. He makes smart, edgy mainstream films. That's harder than making smart, edgy indies. In a pie chart he compiled of questions he's asked time and again during interviews, “How does your father feel about your success?” ranks high. Bursting with pride, is my guess.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Up in the Air (2009)

Rated R for for language and some sexual content

109 minutes

George Clooney as Ryan Bingham

Vera Farmiga as Alex Goran

Anna Kendrick as Keener

Directed by

Jason Reitman
Sheldon Turner

Based on the novel by

Walter Kirn

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Up in the Air

I n 1992, social scientist Marc Augé published his book Non-Places, a study of how we are increasingly accustomed to "dead-space" zones such as airport departure lounges, corporate HQ reception areas, the escalator-stairwells in shopping malls, and hotel corridors with couches on which no one will ever sit. Unlike any room in your own house, in which you have a clear sense of its position relative to the other rooms and the position of your house relative to the surrounding neighbourhood, these are non-places – formless, temporary way-stations of commerce, existing outside geography. The landscape they form is the setting for Jason Reitman's recession satire Up in the Air, about a certain Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney , a guy who is employed by a human resources consultancy to travel around the country, pretty well 52 weeks in the year, firing people.

In theory, Ryan gets called in because he has the expertise in "outplacement" counselling, which the ailing companies do not have in-house. In reality, he is the hatchet man. The bosses lack the nerve to do the firings themselves. It is smooth, plausible Ryan – and Clooney plays a corporate creation not unlike his fixit lawyer in the 2007 thriller Michael Clayton – who must set up shop in some small office, call in dozens of people one by one, and give them the bad news, along with the smooth, hypnotic pep-talk about it being a challenge and an opportunity.

Ryan loves his job. He loves the weightless sense of non-responsibility in never being home; he adores airports with their consumer-opportunities; he thrills to the submissive, company-prescribed greeting to which he is entitled, as a frequent flyer, at the fast-track check-in. Above all, he loves hotels and hotel rooms, perfectly neat, anonymous, with soothing, subdued lighting. Reitman has some great moments when Ryan must come home, and we see how entering his neglected apartment is like returning to a hotel room the maid, inexplicably, has not cleaned: depressing and scuzzy in the harsh daylight. Ryan is moreover having a delicious no-strings affair with another sexy exec with whom his flight-paths cross: Alex, played by Vera Farmiga, tells him she has the same uncomplicated needs as him: "Think of me as you, but with a vagina."

Yet things get complicated; he has messy family issues with his sisters, and then his own boss Craig (Jason Bateman) introduces him to the dynamic young employee Natalie (Anna Kendrick) who has invented new iChat-style firing, which can be done over a webcam, long-distance, thus making expensive air-travel and Ryan's wonderfully footloose existence redundant. Craig forces the resentful Ryan to take uptight young Natalie on the road with him, to show her the ropes before the new virtual-sacking techniques are rolled out. Ryan finds himself defending old-school face-to-face dismissal on the grounds that it is more compassionate, and even feels stirrings of a new compassion in himself, yet must press on with his task of training this young woman to be really good at sacking people. And then … well, it's not quite what you're expecting.

Reitman's movie and his own directorial style reminded me a little of Alexander Payne, and particularly of Payne's About Schmidt (2002), another corporate-disillusion road movie, which also has a central setting in Omaha. The opening credit sequence shows a weirdly mesmeric montage of overhead shots of the cities below as if from Google Earth, or from the undercarriage of a plane.

But this film is considerably lighter and more lenient than Payne's, the picture it resembles more closely is Steven Spielberg's 2004 comedy The Terminal, about a homeless eastern European immigrant who finds himself living in an airport. Like that movie, Up in the Air is surrounded by brand names, albeit of a more upscale sort, and finds in these corporate identifiers something deeply attractive, even faintly narcotic. Ryan loves the sight of Hilton hotels and American Airlines, and takes their gratitude for his "loyalty" entirely seriously. Of course, we, the audience, are invited to understand that Ryan is thereby neglecting the real loyalties of family and emotional commitment, but nonetheless the movie responds to the undoubted, almost sensual pleasure of brand recognition.

Kendrick and Farmiga give nice performances as two of the women in his life: the quasi-daughter and quasi-wife. Reitman contrives a sharp encounter between the three of them – in, naturally, a hotel reception lounge – in which the younger woman explains to these anti-parents what her life goals are, and how depressing she finds their wise compromises of professional middle-age.

As for Clooney, the role is just right for him. It is amiable, genial, yet sophisticated; it does not demand the big head-waggling, saucer-eyed "comedy" routines that he is sometimes, unfortunately, tempted into, and yet it is funny and Clooney's likable presence is as warm on camera as it is in voiceover. There's nothing too profound here, and yet it works well as a smart, light cosmopolitan comedy: it's a snack, rather than a meal, but expertly made.

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Jason Reitman
George Clooney

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Movie Review | 'Up in the Air'

Neither Here Nor There

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By Manohla Dargis

Dec. 3, 2009

For most people there’s no joy in sucking down recycled oxygen while hurtling above the clouds. The free drinks and freshly baked cookies in business might be nice. (I wouldn’t know.) For most of us, though, air travel largely invokes the indignities of the stockyard, complete with the crowding and pushing, the endlessly long lines, hovering handlers, carefully timed feedings, a faint communal reek and underlying whiff of peril. The skies rarely seem friendly anymore, but to Ryan Bingham, the corporate assassin played by George Clooney in the laugh-infused stealth tragedy “Up in the Air,” they’re so welcoming, he might as well be home.

And so he is. Like many high-altitude border crossers who sometimes seem alone in keeping the airlines aloft, those business types with the corrugated brows, juggling BlackBerrys and double-shot lattes, Bingham lives in between here and there, home and away. The difference is, he loves interstitial living, finds comfort and more in all the spaces associated with airports and airplanes or in what Walter Kirn, in his novel that inspired the film, calls Airworld. “To know me is to fly with me,” Bingham says in the film, like an airborne Descartes. It’s as if as a child he had heard and heeded the call of the female attendants for National Airlines who, in the gilded flying age, used to purr, “Fly Me.” Back when flying meant soaring.

That was then, this is now, and this is here, meaning the crash-and-burn-baby-burn America in which one man’s economic crisis is another’s golden opportunity. This is our moment, enthuses Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman, pitch perfect), the unctuous pragmatist for whom Bingham works if rarely sees in person. Some men hunt heads, others like Bingham lop them off. A “career transition” counselor, he crisscrosses the country firing employees whose bosses won’t pull the plug themselves. Racking up scalps and miles might seem like a tough way to make a living. Yet it suits Bingham, a solo act for whom no hotel room is too depressing or crowd too lonely, which makes him ripe for the dramatic picking.

The young director Jason Reitman initially takes a hard-sell approach to Bingham, putting the character and of course Mr. Clooney front, center and under flattering light, as if he were selling a luxury car or diamond watch, which in some ways he is. In fighting trim, Mr. Clooney looks suitably sleek, even when dressed in the generic business clothes he’s soon packing into a suitcase, a task that’s captured in a series of precisely framed, rapid shots. Expressive of both efficiency and a routinized existence, this sequence is itself an economic narrative device (one Mr. Reitman repeats). But it also comes across as glib, a shortcut to character, making it hard to know if it’s Bingham who’s the slick one here or Mr. Reitman.

The answer is both, though Mr. Reitman is working harder than it first appears and more than he did in either “Juno” or “Thank You for Smoking,” his only other features. The son of a funnyman (his father, the producer-director Ivan Reitman, helped bankroll this movie), the younger Mr. Reitman seems to have been weaned on screwball comedies he likes women and teasing patter and classic Hollywood is in his blood. “Up in the Air” is an assertively, and unapologetically, tidy package, from its use of romance to instill some drama into the narrative (the book introduces disease instead) and the mope-rock tunes that Mr. Reitman needlessly overuses. When you have Mr. Clooney and Vera Farmiga on camera, you don’t need some professional emoticon mewling away on the soundtrack.

Ms. Farmiga enters the picture, legs and intelligence flashing, just around the time you think that nothing much is going to happen with Bingham. (A crash? a terrorist strike?) As Alex, a fast-moving businesswoman, Ms. Farmiga bats around the double-entendres effortlessly and brings out real warmth and palpable vulnerability in her co-star. To watch them together particularly during their later scenes, when they visit Bingham’s hometown is to realize just how much alone time Mr. Clooney clocks in his movies. It says something about the dearth of strong female stars in American cinema that he hasn’t been this well matched with a woman since Jennifer Lopez in the 1998 caper film “Out of Sight.” (In the years since, Brad Pitt has been playing Rosalind Russell to Mr. Clooney’s Cary Grant in the “Ocean’s” movies.)

One of the pleasures of “Up in the Air” is that its actresses including Anna Kendrick, who plays Bingham’s colleague Natalie share the frame with Mr. Clooney as equals, not props. The ferocious Ms. Kendrick, her ponytail swinging like an ax, grabs every scene she’s in, which works for her go-getter (go-get-him) character, who is sent out on the road with Bingham as part of an efficiency campaign. She’s a monster for our times: a presumed human-resources expert who, having come of age in front of a computer, has no grasp of the human. By contrast Bingham, who fires people face to face with a small smile and pat speech, comes across as the good guy, though only if you forget what he does for a living.

Mr. Reitman successfully exploits the seeming disconnect between his star (whom we can’t help but like) and the character he plays (whom we want to like, simply because he’s played by Mr. Clooney), so much so that it takes some time for you to notice the approaching darkness. Mr. Reitman certainly hints at the trouble to come: however bright Mr. Clooney’s smile, there is something terribly off about Bingham’s blithe attitude both toward his own existential reality and his profession. Instructively, it is how Mr. Reitman circles around the character, showing how Bingham’s actions affect not just him, but also those around him including the people he fires that deepen the movie if not its peripatetic center.

There are different ways into “Up in the Air,” which can be viewed as a well-timed snapshot of an economically flailing America, appreciated as a study in terminal narcissism or dismissed as a sentimental testament to traditional coupling. A wedding subplot, for one, involving Bingham’s sisters (Melanie Lynskey and Amy Morton), which brings him closer to Alex, threatens to swamp the story in sentimentality. Yet to put too much stock in this detour (which also involves Danny McBride) is to flatten a film bristling with contradictions. Certainly you can fall for Bingham, maybe even shed a tear for him, though don’t get carried away (as he does) or mistake him for some kind of hero. The truer tragedy here, as the repeated images of fired men and women suggest, doesn’t belong to him.

“Up in the Air” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Adult language and partial female nudity if not (alas) male.

UP IN THE AIR

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Jason Reitman; written by Mr. Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn; director of photography, Eric Steelberg; edited by Dana E. Glauberman; music by Rolfe Kent; production designer, Steve Saklad; produced by Ivan Reitman, Jason Reitman, Daniel Dubiecki and Jeffrey Clifford; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.

WITH: George Clooney (Ryan Bingham), Vera Farmiga (Alex Goran), Anna Kendrick (Natalie Keener), Danny McBride (Jim Miller), Jason Bateman (Craig Gregory), Melanie Lynskey (Julie Bingham), Amy Morton (Kara Bingham), Sam Elliott (Maynard Finch), J. K. Simmons (Bob), Zach Galifianakis (Steve) and Chris Lowell (Kevin).

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‘up in the air’: film review.

Before Jason Reitman's film plunges into deeper waters, it seduces us with some of the most darkly hilarious moments to grace the screen in years.

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Up in the air, common sense media reviewers.

Adult dramedy taps into emotions of current tough times.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The movie brings a fresh perspective to the cliche

Main character Ryan is a decent man trying to do a

A man is briefly shown toting a firearm in an imag

A woman is briefly shown naked from behind, with n

Fairly frequent use of everything from “a--h

American Airlines feels like a “proud sponso

Social drinking at bars and parties; at one point,

Positive Messages

The movie brings a fresh perspective to the cliched but true lesson that no man (or woman) is an island. It suggests that in these challenging times, connection may just be the way to survive.

Positive Role Models

Main character Ryan is a decent man trying to do a very difficult job: firing people. Though he can’t do much to help them, he displays unusual empathy for their situation. That said, he’s a pretty isolated guy, proudly unrooted. But he discovers that he needs more in his life and sets out to get it -- as well as give to others. A colleague tries to do her job well, too, but she forgets that efficiency can’t replace humanity. Another character appears to be sympathetic, but she’s complicated: married and constricted by that commitment.

Violence & Scariness

A man is briefly shown toting a firearm in an imaginary sequence. Workers who’ve been fired curse and talk about killing themselves; one tosses a chair around in frustration.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A woman is briefly shown naked from behind, with nothing on but a necktie wrapped around her waist. She and her lover kiss and tussle in bed. They also talk about sex fairly candidly and send each other suggestive messages -- overall, they're shown teasing and bantering more often than having sex. A married character cheats on her husband; another is left by her boyfriend.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Fairly frequent use of everything from “a--hole” to “s--t” to “f--k," as well as "ass," "hell," "crap," "prick," and "oh my God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

American Airlines feels like a “proud sponsor” of the film since its logo is visible nearly every time the main character has to travel. Many other logos and brands associated with business travel also pop up throughout the movie, including Hilton, Hertz, and Marriott.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Social drinking at bars and parties; at one point, a group of revelers is happily intoxicated. A few tiny bottles of liquor are shown tucked in one character’s fridge.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that director Jason Reitman 's thoughtful drama about a man (played by George Clooney ) who fires people for a living (criss-crossing the country by plane to do so) examines uncomfortable, grown-up truths both timely (unemployment, financial stress) and perennial -- family dysfunction and loneliness. Still, despite its heavy themes, strong language (including "s--t" and "f--k"), and some sexual interplay between characters (including brief rear nudity), it has enormous empathy and insight that may resonate with older teens who are trying to grapple with and understand increasingly complex issues. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

Parents say (16)
Kids say (15)

Based on 16 parent reviews

Film Art or Victim Art?

Not worth the effort. not a feel-good movie., what's the story.

Ryan Bingham ( George Clooney ) has a dream: To be the seventh person ever to accumulate 10 million frequent-flier miles. And he's not far off. He spends 270 days a year in the air; airports and planes and hotels are home to him. When he's not on the motivational circuit, extolling the virtues of carrying a lightly packed symbolic backpack -- both objects and people can weigh you down, you see -- he's zigzagging the country to assist companies in firing their workers. And amazingly, he does it with more than a modicum of empathy and soul. But a young upstart ( Twilight supporting player Anna Kendrick ) is convinced that the process can be mechanized -- which could ground Bingham short of his goal, take him away from another business traveler ( Vera Farmiga ) he's fallen in love with, and make him examine what -- and where -- is really home.

Is It Any Good?

UP IN THE AIR is by no means perfect. To start, it hits screenplay mileposts a little too on the nose, like an A student raising his hand for yet another crack at an answer we know he'll get. And yet it takes us to places we never quite expect. It's irreverent when we think it will be serious; serious when we think it will go for laughs. It's surprising -- and that doesn't happen often in the movies these days.

Based on a bestselling novel by Walter Kirn, Jason Reitman 's film is literary without being self-consciously so. Clooney delivers perhaps his best performance yet, with more nuance and less reliance on his usual tics (the downcast looks, the easy smile). The vulnerability he displays with Farmiga, a worthy female counterpart, convinces but doesn't overplay. Bingham's journey is one we've all found ourselves on: how to connect in a world that makes it so easy to be within reach, yet so hard to reach out, even to family. It also captures these challenging times, when jobs and, yes, people seem expendable. And yet, they're not: The film gives them a voice, one downsized worker at a time.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Bingham's job: Is it a difficult one? Does he enjoy it? Why does he seem committed to doing it? Does it make him a bad guy or good? What about Natalie, his colleague?

How does the movie capture a particular moment in history? Does it seem realistic, or has it been Hollywood-ized?

Who do you think the movie is trying to reach? Does it succeed?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 4, 2009
On DVD or streaming : March 9, 2010
Cast : Anna Kendrick , George Clooney , Vera Farmiga
Director : Jason Reitman
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Paramount Pictures
Genre : Drama
Run time : 109 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language and some sexual content
Last updated : December 6, 2023

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Up in the Air Reviews

(Clooney and Farmiga) keep the wit and chemistry bouncing back and forth like a modern-day Tracy and Hepburn, if you can picture Hepburn sashaying across a hotel room wearing nothing but a man's necktie looped around her waist.

Full Review | Jan 15, 2010

George Clooney is amazing in this even though he wasn't even born at the time it was made!

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Nov 18, 2009

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'Up In The Air': Life, No Strings Attached

Kenneth Turan

Last Call: George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a corporate hit man hired to fly around the country and fire downsized employees. A frequent flier and a professional drifter, Ryan leads a life devoid of attachment. Dale Robinette/Paramount Pictures hide caption

Up In The Air

Director: Jason Reitman
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Running Time: 109 minutes

Rated R: Language and sexual content With: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick

Watch Clips

'Order Five Meals'

Media no longer available

'Club Cards'

'Something Real'

Up In The Air makes textured filmmaking look easy. It blends entertainment and insight, comedy and poignancy, even drama and reality, and never seems to break a sweat.

Up In The Air stars George Clooney as Ryan, a corporate hit man who flies around the country firing people for companies who are too timid to do it themselves. Ryan loves the soothing predictability that goes with high-end business travel. At home in airports and on planes the way few people are at home anywhere, he's made a science of security lines and moves cards through optical devices like scanning was an Olympic sport.

Two women throw Ryan off his confident stride. First is a whip-smart number cruncher from his office, played by Anna Kendrick, who questions everything he believes in. She's frankly dubious as he tells her about his personal quest for 10 million frequent-flier miles .

Then Ryan catches the eye of a business traveler named Alex, who shares his love for frequent flying, and who is as passionate about the system as he is.

Played by the exceptional Vera Farmiga, Alex is so much Ryan's psychic twin that he finds himself synchronizing schedules with her so they can share steamy airport rendezvous.

Credit for all this goes to writer-director Jason Reitman , who used a novel by Walter Kirn as his jumping-off point. The question Up In The Air gracefully poses is whether Ryan's detachment can survive contact with genuine emotion.

The answer turns out to be gratifyingly complex, a further reason to celebrate a director who has filmmaking in his bones.

The Movie Review: 'Up in the Air'

The protagonist of Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham, is a hatchet man for hire. The Omaha company that employs him, which goes by the Orwellian name Career Transition Counseling (CTC), rents him out to other companies to fire employees they don't have the courage to fire themselves. He flies about the country, touching down briefly in Kansas City or Tulsa or Miami, to walk into offices he has never visited and tell workers he has never met that they are being let go. There are tears, and rages, and Bingham accepts them with unflappable grace.

Indeed, it quickly becomes clear that his detached demeanor is less a corollary of his job than vice versa. Charming and affable--did I mention he is played by George Clooney?--Bingham is nonetheless an emphatic rebuttal of John Donne's adage about men and islands: romantically uncommitted, distant from family, and in pursuit of a side business as a self-help lecturer who preaches the gospel of emotional disencumbrance. Last year, he informs us, he spent 322 days traveling, "which means I had to spend 43 miserable days at home." His true residence is a stool in the airport lounge, a room at the Hilton, a seat in the first class cabin. He is, quite literally, above it all.

At least, that is, until his boss (Jason Bateman) upsets the delicate equilibrium of his life by informing him that the wheels of capitalism require even more lubrication than CTC currently provides. A fresh-faced B-school graduate, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), has come up with a plan to fire folks via video link, a move that would end Bingham's obsessive accretion of airline miles. When Bingham protests that she doesn't understand the value of the face-to-face interaction, that "there is a dignity to what I do," he is tasked with taking his young colleague on the road--or rather, to the air--to show her just exactly what that is.

In the course of his travels, Bingham encounters a kindred spirit in skirt and heels named Alex (Vera Farmiga), whose carnal enthusiasm is exceeded only by her aversion to emotional entanglement, a mirror to his own. ("Think of me as yourself," she tells him, "but with a vagina.") The two first meet in a hotel bar, of course, and conduct foreplay by comparing elite-status cards and frequent flyer miles. When he declines to disclose the latter figure, she places her palms a foot apart and inquires coyly, "Is it this big?" "I don't want to brag," he demurs. Her job requires nearly as much flight time as his, so the two meet for a series of romantic interludes at airport hotels, culminating with his invitation that she accompany him to his sister's wedding, an experiment in intimacy on more than one front.

Reitman directs Up in the Air with a light touch, offering a kind of upbeat existentialism. Though it is a story about Bingham's isolation, the character is in a near-constant state of interaction: with Alex, with Natalie, with his sister (Melanie Lynskey) and her fiancé (Danny McBride), and with the litany of unfortunates whom he steers gently into unemployment (including J. K. Simmons and Zach Galifianakis). This is a man who has kept to himself not by hiding from the world but by spreading himself across it so thinly that no one else ever has access to more than a sliver.

Clooney wears the role with such ease that it is difficult to imagine any other actor even attempting it. Smooth, intelligent, and exquisitely comfortable in his own skin, his Bingham is a born talker, whether coaxing a fired employee down from the ledge of despair or inviting a roomful of seminar attendees to empty their metaphorical "backpacks" of a lifetime's worth of commitments. Moreover, the sharp, literate script (adapted from the Walter Kirn novel by Reitman and Sheldon Turner) offers Clooney a wealth of good lines with plenty left over for the rest of the cast, in particular the excellent Farmiga.

There are scattered missteps--a conversation with a reluctant groom that could have used a few more beats, a series of cameos by laid-off workers testifying to the Importance of Family that make the movie's moral more explicit than it need have been--but overall Reitman delivers, with Clooney's assistance, one of the nimblest grownup entertainments of recent years. (In light of this film's quality and Jennifer's Body 's distinct lack thereof, it is high time to reevaluate how much of Juno 's success was due to Reitman's direction and how much to Diablo Cody's script.)

If there is a broader complaint to be made of the film--and I'm of two minds whether there is--it's that, it, too, floats along the surface a bit. With the exception of a wedding montage set to a song by the soon-to-be-far-better-known Sad Brad Smith, Up in the Air rarely makes a strong emotional connection. This may be inevitable in the case of Clooney's character--it is, after all, difficult to care too deeply about the isolation of a man who does not care too deeply about it himself--but it extends to the rest of the film as well: the girl who has her heart broken, the workers whose lives are abruptly shattered.

This reluctance to dig deeper may be the difference between a very good film, which Up in the Air is by any reasonable measure, and a great one. As it is, Reitman has given us a witty, elegant movie that is nonetheless, like its protagonist, somewhat aloof from the vicissitudes experienced by mere mortals.

This post originally appeared at TNR.com.

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DVD & Streaming

Up in the Air

Comedy , Drama , Romance

Content Caution

In Theaters

December 4, 2009
George Clooney as Ryan Bingham; Vera Farmiga as Alex Goran; Anna Kendrick as Natalie Keener; Jason Bateman as Craig Gregory; J.K. Simmons as Bob; Amy Morton as Kara Bingham; Danny McBride as Jim; Melanie Lynskey as Julie

Home Release Date

March 9, 2010
Jason Reitman

Distributor

Paramount Pictures

Movie Review

Ryan Bingham’s occupation is to relieve people of theirs. He spends 322 days on the road, living out of a carry-on bag and firing employees for corporate honchos who are too gutless to do it themselves. In depressed economic times, his career crescendos.

He packs clothing, wields frequent flyer miles and navigates security with a drill sergeant’s precision. And his solitary, Up in the Air existence is the only thing he loves. It’s delightfully devoid of commitment, affection and other messy complexities of life. He even moonlights as a motivational speaker, giving self-help lectures on how to simplify life by avoiding relational interaction and obligation.

So meeting Alex throws a huge wrench into Bingham’s machine. His female shark-like equivalent, she’s looking for no-strings-attached sex and companionship on business trips. But their episodic interstate hotel trysts gradually leave Bingham suddenly feeling lonely (!) and wanting more.

Twenty-three-year-old upstart dynamo Natalie is equally disruptive to Bingham’s detached routines. She introduces the idea of firing people remotely over the Internet, possibly saving their company millions in travel expenses—but simultaneously threatening Bingham’s very existence.

You see, Bingham oxymoronically believes employees deserve a personal touch when being let go. He demands that inexperienced Natalie learn the old ways before insisting on new ones. Their boss, Craig, concedes, but requires Bingham to do the showing during a cross-country firing expedition. The two immediately challenge each other’s core beliefs, and both are left in a quandary: Natalie wonders if she can live with herself as she destroys people’s lives. Bingham wonders if he can face having a grown-up connection.

Positive Elements

Bingham’s story brings to light a whole host of issues worth thinking about when it comes to relationships. More on that in my “Conclusion.”

While firing an employee named Bob, Bingham challenges him to rethink his life’s direction, giving him hope. Rather than considering the layoff negative, he tells Bob to see it as a rebirth and chance to pursue his talents and dreams.

Though he hasn’t seen his sisters Kara or Julie in years (Kara tells him, “Basically you don’t exist to us”), he goes to Julie’s wedding and even offers to walk her down the aisle. Later he intervenes when Julie’s fiancé, Jim, gets cold feet, and gives a very-unlikely-from-him pep talk on the importance of companionship and family. When Jim comes around, the experience brings Bingham closer to his siblings. Later he sets up a generous vacation fund for Julie and her new husband.

Craig’s greed and glee in a flagging job market serves as an example not meant to be followed. As does antihero Bingham’s habit of sizing up fellow flyers based almost solely on their race. More negatives that the movie clearly presents as negatives include Bingham manipulating flight attendants (for betters seat assignments) and his ability to apply a false sense of compassion when dealing with the fragile people he fires. Indeed, he’s pretended to feel sympathy for so long that he now seems to think he is actually empathetic. He’s still lying to them, though, when he tells them that their relationship with him is “just the beginning,” and that he’ll help them transition into their next job. In reality he knows he’ll never see them again.

Two more things fall into this negative-positive category: True to the world’s increasingly impersonal style, Natalie quits a job via text message, and her boyfriend breaks up with her using the same method.

Spiritual Elements

Bingham loosely compares his profession to the Greek god Charon, who ferries souls across the Styx in the afterlife. A traditional marriage ceremony is shown.

Sexual Content

Bingham and Alex’s banter about frequent flyer miles and rental cars is riddled with double entendres. And soon he takes her to his hotel room, where the camera gets a shot of her naked backside. (Bingham’s bare-chested.) They kiss, talk briefly of sexual positions and meet for similar rendezvous later.

Unbeknownst to Bingham, Alex is married, and when he visits her residence unexpectedly, she tells him to leave, hissing, “That’s my family. That’s my real life.” She calls him a “parenthesis” and an “escape”—two things he himself had sought until their relationship.

A reference or two is made to homosexuality, prostitution, masturbation and erections. Alex and Bingham “sext” each other. At least one other couple kisses passionately. Women in low-cut dresses show some cleavage.

Violent Content

A recently axed employee pours bleach into the office coffeepot and wields a rifle in a sniper-like attempt at revenge. (No one is hurt.) We hear that an employee whom Natalie and Ryan fired committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.

Crude or Profane Language

Close to 25 f-words and about 10 s-words. God’s name is misused a half-dozen times, Christ’s another three or four. Other language includes a few utterances each of “h‑‑‑,” “a‑‑hole,” “pr‑‑k,” “p‑‑‑ed,” “d‑‑k” and “p‑‑‑y.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Alex and Bingham first meet over cocktails in a bar. Later the couple and Natalie crash a corporate party where Natalie gets drunk. Alcohol also makes appearances on planes and in hotel minibars and restaurants.

Other Negative Elements

Alex and Bingham break into a school.

Based on Walter Kirk’s 2001 novel, Up in the Air explores the price of relationships—and the cost of a life without them.

“How much does your life weigh?” Bingham asks. And he tells audiences to imagine carrying their lives around in a backpack. First put in the knickknacks, the linens, clothes, TV and couch. Eventually add relationships—everyone from acquaintances to a spouse. Then ponder the crushing weight of the obligations, negotiations and secret compromises made because of these people and things.

Bingham prefers to walk away from it all. His life is about streamlining and traveling light. “The slower we move, the faster we die,” he says.

So it’s no coincidence that director Jason Reitman uses The Velveteen Rabbit in one of his scenes. The children’s story exemplifies Bingham’s life: fear of becoming authentic through relationship. After all, being in communion with people is demanding. As the rabbit demonstrates, it wears out your joints, exhausts you and damages your fur.

But it simultaneously makes your life and world wonderfully real.

Bingham does grow to realize that his sterile reality is not a life at all. But downtrodden by Alex’s rejection—and unlike Natalie who courageously seeks other employment—he cannot find it in himself to change. His, then, becomes more of a cautionary tale than an inspirational one as his plight indirectly elevates pursuing family and friends over stockpiling frequent flyer miles.

(The film’s inclusion of sex, boozing and foul language defies direct inspiration , too.)

“We are here to make limbo more tolerable” for the newly unemployed, Bingham tells Natalie. In reality, though, he’s the one treading water. The movie knows it. And we know it.

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UP IN THE AIR Review

Up in the Air is a great movie. The script is sharp, Jason Reitman's direction is astonishing, the cast is outstanding, and its story is as timely as its themes are timeless. The film is a strong awards contender but rather than tap into important figures or controversial issues, Up in the Air finds its hero in the most unlikely of people: Ryan Bingham (played by George Clooney) a man who loves air travel and whose job it is to lay people off because their bosses are spineless weasels. He's turns both travel and firing into an art, but discovers that a simple and satisfying life can be just as fragile as a personal life he'd rather leave on the ground.

Ryan Bingham has a peculiar goal in life: reach 10,000,000 frequent flyer miles. He is the perfect flyer. He travels light, knows which airport security line to use, and ranks car rental services like most people would rank cars they actually want to own. He's able to accumulate this kind of mileage and travel expertise by working for a company whose sole purpose is to send "termination specialists" to various businesses and fire people. This too is an art form for Ryan as he can spout the company's meaningless platitudes to the recently downsized (I still don't understand what, "Everyone who ever ruled an empire is sitting where you are right now,"; My world history is a little rusty but I believe no one ever fired Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great). Ryan uses his lifestyle as a way to push his gig as a motivational speaker where he argues, like some twisted Buddhist monk, that both possessions and people do nothing but weigh us down and make our lives shorter. Unfortunately for Ryan, people begin to enter his life as he starts to fall for kindred spirit Alex (Vera Farmiga) and provide field experience to neophyte Natalie (Anna Kendrick) who wants to turn the firing business digital, which would ground Ryan indefinitely by removing the need to travel.

The first half of Up in the Air almost sings with its light touch, funny dialogue, and breezy style. Where the film begins to slow up is congruent where Ryan begins to touchdown and tries to build a meaningful relationship with Alex and reconnect to his sisters. It can be slightly deflating to change gears so rapidly but the story necessitates it and it's the only way to get to the meaningful third act that will stick with audiences after they leave the theater. It is rocky to go from such a light comedy to a contemplative drama but the payoff is worth it and it's a cinematic case of doing what's right for the film rather than trying to play into audience expectations for the easy cheer.

Almost everything else clicks perfectly. Farmiga once again shows that while other female actresses may get sexy photo spreads, she's got talent to spare (that's not to say she's unattractive; when you see the film, note that she does not use a body double). The film provides a breakthrough performance for Kendrick and after this film she's going to be high in demand, especially if she lands an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress (an accolade already bestowed upon her by the National Board of Review earlier today). I'm not entirely sure if it's reflected glory but she does a fine job of hitting her character's emotional beats. Sadly, Kendrick disappears in the second half of the movie as do most of the small supporting roles from actors like Zach Galifianakis or J.K. Simmons who turn in some nice work despite only appearing in one scene.

But Clooney is a different story. The guy is talented as hell, but the question I found myself asking the second time I saw the film was this: would the role work as well or better if it were played by a character actor like Paul Giamatti? Clooney's charm is undeniable but wouldn't that open up Ryan's world rather than keep it in the tight shell he's constructed for himself? And why wouldn't a guy as good-looking and charismatic as Clooney be confident? Would a performance of confidence from a character actor provided more depth? I don't have the answers to these questions, but make no mistake: Clooney is the goods in this film.

The music, the cinematography, the editing are all aces with Reitman bringing it all together splendidly. It's unfair that he should be this good at only his third film. Shouldn't there be more of a learning curve? I know he's the son of Ivan Reitman, but Reitman the Elder never directed films like Thank You for Smoking , Juno , or Up in the Air . When a director is this good at so young an age (when he was nominated for Best Director in 2007 for Juno , he was the youngest director to receive that honor), it's terrifying to consider how much better he can be. Up in the Air lifts Reitman to one of the best directors working today.

There will always be films where the acclaim is completely undeserved or it's difficult to see beyond the hype. Up in the Air is not one of those films. If you need any more convincing, it makes air travel look appealing and will have you cheering for a guy whose job is to bring misery into the world. It does both without sugarcoating and never looks down on its audience. Book your ticket now.

Rating ----- A minus

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Movie Review: Up in the Air (2009)

General Disdain
Movie Reviews
16 responses
--> December 6, 2009

Don’t be fooled by the trailers for Up in the Air . It may seem like a formulaic romantic comedy. It’s not. Not by a long shot. Jason Reitman, following up his Juno breakthrough, has put together a finely developed and many times amusing story about choices — both personal and professional — and their consequences — planned and unplanned — to oneself and to others.

And it is these choices, for better of worse (depending on whose perspective you are looking from), that smooth talker Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is all about cashing in on. Coining himself as the “Termination Facilitator”, he zigzags across the country and delivers that dreaded zinger to employees — of whatever company that’s hired him — that they’re now out of a job. To you and me it would seem like a thankless job, but Bingham relishes his position and the freedom it affords him — i.e., no commitments.

In this role, Clooney shows, once again, why he is one of the more sought after actors on the planet. Reitman claimed he wrote the role specifically with Clooney in mind and without a doubt it shows. George sweats confidence and puts forth that swagger without being entirely egotistical that is needed for a man hired to fire people. He’s also able to pull off the opposite side of the spectrum equally well — Bingham is also one lonely son of a bitch even though he thinks he isn’t. A streak of fear runs through him too when he finds he himself may be shit canned.

That’s right what goes around comes around. Recent graduate and looking to make a name for herself, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) convinces Bingham’s boss Craig (Jason Bateman) that there is money to be saved by firing people via video conferencing. It stands to be a tidy sum of money when you stop to think the amount of layoffs occurring this day and age and that Ryan has nearly accumulated 10,000,000 air miles. Self preservation kicks in and he gets Natalie to tag along so she can see for herself that ironically it isn’t only about the bottom line — his “personal touch” is worth the price.

The other lady in Ryan’s life is quite nearly a mirror image of himself. Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) is a constant traveler too, finding herself living out of a suitcase most days of the year. And while both agree relationships complicate their lives; they alter their flight schedules so they can happen into one another for fleeting sex and camaraderie. She is wholly more complex than she lets on and the chemistry between the two is rather fresh and striking.

All combined, Up in the Air is a masterstroke. Reitman mixes the elements of drama and satire superbly; gets a great performance from his bankable star; and gets even better performances by his two lesser known actresses. And seeing as the film was released so late in the year, it is surely looking for Oscar consideration. Being such a fine movie, I can’t imagine it won’t earn a nod or two . . .

I'm an old, miserable fart set in his ways. Some of the things that bring a smile to my face are (in no particular order): Teenage back acne, the rain on my face, long walks on the beach and redneck women named Francis. Oh yeah, I like to watch and criticize movies.

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'Movie Review: Up in the Air (2009)' have 16 comments

December 6, 2009 @ 5:32 pm Steven Smith

I’ll partially agree with you that George Clooney is a good actor. The reason he is good though is because he always plays the same role type (paraphrasing from your review): “Confident with that swagger that isn’t entirely egotistical.” Take a look at his body of work and I think you’ll agree. Break him out of his comfort zone and I’ll bet he turns into a pumpkin.

December 8, 2009 @ 2:57 am akira

most recently i watched Men who stare at the goats movie where George Clooney acted very different character. in this time he plays in up in the air movie and it was really fantastic.

December 11, 2009 @ 9:19 am General Disdain

Steven –

Clooney takes on all role types and, more often than not, does a fine job.

December 20, 2009 @ 9:04 am Elmer Carlson

Clooney performed well in this movie. Also, the movie is undeniably great that discussed layoffs.

January 20, 2010 @ 2:41 pm Van Lines

the chemistry between the leads was fantastic and anna kendrick’s performance was criminally underrated. I definitely see a nomination or 3.

January 30, 2010 @ 8:35 am Katy

I enjoyed the movie and thought the performances were great, especially Anna Kendrick’s. I also could see the “real” George Clooney in this role..I’m not sure if it took much acting at all. However, as good as the acting was, I thought most of the movie was predictable. In fact I “called” many scenes before they happened except the ending. I wish the ending was different..I thought is was terribly sad.

January 30, 2010 @ 4:26 pm JerseyMike

For some reason, I couldn’t connect with this movie. I didn’t find it particularly interesting or engaging for me to give it high marks. I think Clooney did the part justice, but it was a-typical role for him…

I just wished I liked the film more, I certainly wanted too…

January 30, 2010 @ 9:43 pm Jamie

Just watched it and it was a very quiet film with good writing and excellent performances. I kinda liked how Reitman introduced the characters in the first half, the brilliant part of the film but in the 2nd half was a total…meh. Filled with cliches, poor pacing and visual editing. Anna Kendrick is definitely a scene stealer. She gave the best performance in the film, but her crying scene is really irritating. Vera Farmiga provided a very subtle and sexy work in here but I expected more. George Clooney is also very good as the central character, although there are some scenes that he bores me. Brillianr first half, mediocre second half. 9/10

April 7, 2010 @ 5:14 am country show

Its fantastic movie. Its comedy is amazing. Jason Reitman done a great job for making this great movie.

May 10, 2010 @ 6:21 am Jessica Jameson

Up In The Air was the best movie I had seen in a while, I can say its the best in even maybe 5 years time – it gave me sooooo much mentally and Georg Clooney put the icing on the cake in this movie :)

September 1, 2010 @ 11:45 am FPP

I’ve loved this movie. Seen it 3 times and i would still wacht it.

September 20, 2010 @ 8:35 pm Reuben

We weren’t sure if we would enjoy this movie since it dealt with people getting fired, however, we were pleasantly surprised. We found the characters to be interesting and the movie enjoyable. George Clooney and Anna Kendrick had wonderful chemistry.

October 5, 2010 @ 4:45 am Thomas Angelo

Great movie. Was in theater three times so liked it. I was stunned that movie with a budget of $25m could earn more than $158m (and statistics are growing) Recommend to all who want to relax and have a good time with friends

October 5, 2010 @ 8:51 am Miwa Portnoy

Hell yeah! Sure it`s great! Seen it only once, but have a strong impressions for a long time. Only District 9 could beat it. (don`t blame – I know that these movies in different genres. I mean impression)

November 4, 2010 @ 4:34 pm Mephisto

I liked this movie personally. I think Clooney is one of the funniest actors out there at the moment. He tends to be basically the same character in most of his movies. A guy who is in control, but is slightly crazy. Maybe a better term would be off the wall. I would rate this film a 8 out of 10 stars. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

November 8, 2010 @ 6:25 pm CMrok93

A well-acted piece about a man’s inability to cope with a world more real than the one he lives. And the screenplay just keeps on getting better and better. Nice review, check out mine when you can!

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UP IN THE AIR

"wasted life".

What You Need To Know:

(RoRo, B, C, AB, LLL, V, SS, NN, A, DD, M) Confused, but strong Romantic worldview set in a hedonistic, egotistical world, with a slight morality lesson where the hero ultimately figures out his hedonistic lifestyle is a waste, plus a wedding set in a Christian church with Christian symbols but movie does not take advantage of the setting to deliver a more inspiring message and ends on depressing note with no solutions; at least 50 obscenities and five profanities; people being fired get aggressive, knock over chairs, clean off table tops, and one threatens to commit suicide and later does so; adulterous sex with sex act not shown but many descriptions of sex and acceptance of sex messages; very provocative rear female nudity and upper male nudity; frequent alcohol use; smoking and discussion of drugs; and, verbal abuse and deception.

More Detail:

UP IN THE AIR is an often funny but very dark cautionary tale with no hint of a solution to life’s problems.

Ryan Bingham is a corporate downsizer who fires people. He flies so much that he’s almost reached 10 million miles. On the side, he lectures about getting rid of the excess stuff in your life, including people. He travels so much that, when he’s asked where his home is, he says, “Here,” while he’s sitting on the plane.

Ryan also has many one-night stands with women. He meets a woman named Alex who captivates him by just wanting extreme recreational sex on planes, in hotel rooms, and anywhere else.

One day Ryan is called back to the corporate headquarters with all the other corporate downsizers to hear about a great cost-saving system. Brilliant but naïve twenty something efficiency expert, Natalie, has convinced Ryan’s company that they can fire people via video conferencing. Ryan is shocked and convinces the company to let him take Natalie on a world-wind tour of corporations where he will be firing people. Ryan is tough but effective in his firing techniques. Natalie goofs up, and a client’s career hangs in the balance.

Ryan goes to his niece’s wedding, where he and has to talk the groom out of having cold feet. Ryan realizes he may be wrong about jettisoning everything in life, so he goes to propose to Alex, but is in for the shock of his life.

George Clooney does a terrific job of playing Ryan Bingham. Anna Kendrick is excellent as Natalie. There are many hilarious moments, but there are many horrifying moments as Ryan fires people whose whole lives are coming to an end. He doesn’t care a bit about these people. The movie clearly shows that his selfish, egotistical attitude is ultimately a disaster. The only hopeful thing is finding a mate, but much of the movie shows that marriage is a disaster too.

There was an opportunity to show real hope at his niece’s wedding, but the wedding is filmed like a music video with no sermon and hope. The wedding is set in a church with symbols of the Cross and other artifacts, but the movie passes by all of the real hope to end on a completely depressing note.

UP IN THE AIR is getting a lot of critical buzz, perhaps because it shows the cruelty of the corporate structure firing lifetime employees. Perhaps because people realize that Ryan’s egocentric, hedonistic lifestyle is a disaster. It seems a very apt portrait of a society without a soul. The problem is that there is a soul to this society, and there is an answer to Ryan’s problems.

Every problem raised in the movie has been answered by Jesus Christ. He died on the Cross to forgive us so that we can forgive others. He rose again so that we could be born again and live with the eternal hope of a life sustained by His grace through the power of His Holy Spirit and the Word of God, the Bible. This is the type of movie where it would be nice to stand outside the theater and talk to the viewers about the hope of a Jesus Christ after the movie has driven them to the point of despair. It is sad watching George Clooney in this role, because it is almost autobiographical.

Now, media-wise viewers must be warned that there are a lot of “f” words in this movie, and a very shocking scene of rear female nudity near the beginning. The multiple descriptions of sex are also quite crude. Without all this, the movie could have been more acceptable, with a Minus 2 of Extreme Caution. As it is, UP IN THE AIR is excessive and ultimately uninspiring. It should be re-titled DOWN IN THE DUMPS.

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The Life and Times of Ben Weinberg

Entrepreneur, ESL Teacher, Traveler, and Writer

‘Up In The Air’ – Film Review and Analysis

“The choices he has made haven’t caught up to him yet, but he is on the path he has chosen that while unorthodox to most leaves him satisfied and content with who he is.”

Ryan Bingham has chosen a different life path than most people he knows. Instead of staying in his hometown, reveling in the glories past of high school and the diner down the road, he wanted to leave his roots and his family for his true passion in life: being up in the air and striving for excellence as a motivational speaker. The choices he has made haven’t caught up to him yet, but he is on the path he has chosen that while unorthodox to most leaves him satisfied and content with who he is.

Bingham (played by George Clooney) is at a crossroads in middle age where he has forgone the responsibilities that are normally achieved by most people his age with a house and a picket fence, being married, and maybe having children. He has forgone all that for an industry on the rise sadly at the time the film is set in and for being out on the road and up in the air for 250+ days of the year. He advocates for a life in motion because if he is not moving, he is not actually living.

His work like his constant travel is an unorthodox industry where he works as a human resources consultant traveling both domestically and internationally to do the dirty work of firing or ‘letting go’ employees in person and providing them with transition packet(s) that the company that’s firing them is leaving them with to help them in the ‘transition’ period. It is a rough job that due to the 2008-2009 global recession has made his HR consultancy firm as needed as ever. The one industry at the time that is gaining jobs rather than losing jobs, Ryan finds himself at risk of having his life of work travel outsources to advancements in video technology (about ten years before Zoom and Skype became mainstream).

While Ryan Bingham is not at risk of getting laid off like so many other working Americans during the period of the Great Recession, the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s, Bingham is at risk of losing his life of travel on the road due to firing people via telecommunications video instead. To make matters worse, his boss Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman) is tasking him with having a new hire out of Yale University, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) shadow his in-person firings for a few months as the company, CTC, makes the transition to virtual consulting instead of letting those employees go in-person from now on.

That is not the only change that threatens to upend Ryan’s life choice as he has met a charming, attractive woman who has the same lifestyle as him and appears to see life as he does with less commitments and more choice. Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) is the constantly traveling business woman for whom Ryan may have finally met his match. While they started out as a casual fling, Ryan begins to develop feelings for her as he ponders his uncertain future of life on the road as well as the fact that once he achieves his life goal of ten million airline miles accumulated may not have much to strive for.

Ryan and Natalie may not show it at first but the firings and the emotional weight of being responsible for upending people’s lives cause them stress, anxiety, and a desire to break free of their own pains in doing the job they have chosen. While Ryan is content with travel on the road, he hears from his estranged sister, Kara, that his other, younger sister, Julie is getting married. Ryan left home when he first could leave and never looked back, and his family still remembers that. He is the ‘black sheep’ of the family, known to pursue his own gratification while letting his relationships deteriorate over the years.

Having Alex as a love interest has reignited his desire to see his sisters again and to be there for the wedding in northern Wisconsin. Him and Alex are still a bit of a mystery to each other, but they enjoy each other’s company, and he invites her to join him as the +1 guest, not wanting to be the ‘guy alone at the bar’ watching all the couples enjoy a dance together. There are these moments of vulnerability interspersed through ‘Up in The Air’ that remind the audience that all these characters have their own flaws and shortcomings. They are not perfect people, and the film does not judge them outright but allows the audience to decide if they are admirable or detestable or a bit of both. What I love most is that the film director and writers allow us to decide if we agree with Ryan’s choices or if we would have chosen to go the other route in life that he has neglected.

Sometimes, it is never too late to choose a different path than the one that we have set out for ourselves. However, whether we can pull back from previous choices made and to get a fresh start on a new path, is one of the underlying themes of ‘Up in The Air.’ Ryan can try to start a real relationship with Alex, make amends with his sisters and be more present in their lives, and still achieve his 10-million-mile goal but life can get in the way so it’s possible he will not be as successful in salvaging both his relationships, his career goals, and his need for travel. Even if he thinks he can be successful at keeping everybody in his life happy, he may have to make sacrifices as in life, it can be nearly impossible to keep all options available to you.

The priorities we make now while end up defining us far into the future and there may come a time where the sacrifices, we make in one area may lead to a lack of connection or attachment or fulfilment in another area. Throughout the film during Ryan’s motivational speeches, he talks about the ‘stuff’ in life weighing us down whether it’s our relationships, our possessions, and even our desires. He makes the point in the audience that ‘life can be better footloose’ and not as tied down to suffer from it. However, what the film makes clear is that when you find real happiness in a relationship, can you pivot to slowing down with that heavier backpack you carry around because you feel fulfilled to do so? Can Ryan make room for a real relationship with Alex or his sisters to give up life on the road so his backpack will be heavier, but he’ll still be happier as a result, and maybe that what’s he was missing all this time around?

While Ryan is a ‘road warrior’ and enjoys not being attached to anyone or anything, who will be there for him if he must stay at his scant one-bedroom apartment in Omaha or if he were to be fired from his job where he fires other people. The film brilliantly shows real people who’ve been through real loss in terms of their jobs and livelihoods, and how while it is almost impossible to get through it, they could not keep going on without their responsibility to their families or the love that their families show for them in those tough times. In life, it always helps to have a good support system or to have good people like family motivating you to get you through the tough times.

Ryan may be prepared for a life unattached now, but he may find as he gets older, that his choice to not have many or any attachments at all may lead to the loneliness and pain that then can come from facing life’s hurdles alone, especially when you don’t truly get to know the person because you are so busy traveling and can’t make time for them at all. As Ryan says to his sister Julie’s husband-to-be, Jim, on their wedding day to help him get over his ‘cold feet’ at getting married, “Life’s better with company.”

Author: Ben W.

Hello, I am an Entrepreneur in Online Education focusing on English as a Second Language Studies. I offer online courses and eBooks on English grammar, Business English, and English writing. I also recently released my first personal development guide. You can find all of these offerings below and please sign-up for updates to come! Thanks. View all posts by Ben W.

Up in the Air (United States, 2009)

Up in the Air is a wonderful little film (the word "little" being relative, of course). It was the best thing I saw at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, and it stand up as well away from the peculiar atmosphere of the festival as it did within the hermetically sealed environment. This is George Clooney's third film of the Oscar season (the other two being The Men Who Stare at Goats and the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox ) and the one most likely to be acknowledged by the Academy. With director Jason Reitman behind the camera making his follow-up to Juno (a more successful one, I might add, than Diablo Cody's), this is far from 100% formula, and that's the reason why the marketing campaign is being handled carefully. The film needs to build word-of-mouth to find an audience, and I'm here to do what I can to help along the effort.

Reitman brings the same mixture of comedy and drama to this movie that he brought to Juno . There's some funny, laugh-out-loud material here, but the characters and their situations are well-developed. None of the three principals ever veer in the direction of caricature and Clooney is especially convincing as the lead. Playing a role 180 degrees opposite to the one he essays in The Men Who Stare at Goats , Clooney reminds us why he is among this generation's most consistent and reliable actors.

It helps immeasurably that Clooney's supporting female duo is in top form. Vera Farmiga, who, not unlike Tilda Swinton, has the uncanny ability be entirely credible as a sultry siren or a frumpy housewife, provides Clooney's perfect foil. She's in "upscale" mode here; their verbal jousts are memorable and the sexual chemistry between them sizzles. No less impressive is Anna Kendrick, whose performance as the ingénue getting some hard life lessons allows us to forgive her appearing in the Twilight series. She's easily dismissed in those; here, she shows that she has acting chops and knows what to do with them.

Clooney plays corporate layoff officer Ryan Bingham, a man whose most salient quality is his impermanence. He spends his days traveling from city-to-city and, for a fee, he delivers news of layoffs to soon-to-be-departed employees. He lives his life in hotels, airplanes, and airports, saying "All the things you hate about flying are warm reminders I'm home." In the past year, he has spent 322 days on the road and 43 "miserable" days in the one-bedroom unit he rents in Omaha. He has no time for relationships or possessions, and his one goal in life is to collect 10,000,000 miles so he can become the seventh member of that oh-so-rare club.

Two events add chaos to Ryan's ordered existence. The first is a chance meeting with fellow traveler Alex (Vera Farmiga), who expresses herself this way: "Think of me as yourself, only with a vagina." In Alex, Ryan finds someone with whom he might actually be able to develop a semi-normal relationship, even if it is predominantly in hotels and airports. Meanwhile, at home base, Ryan's boss, Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman), has decided to implement a radical new strategy proposed by new hire Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) - using teleconference technology to allow remote layoffs. Determined to prove to her that this is not the way to go, Ryan brings Natalie on the road with him with unexpected results.

Up in the Air is one of the best movies to deal with the inhumanity of the way corporations cut work forces. The parody is razor-sharp and unflinching. Reitman nails his targets one-by-one and drives home each spike with resolute force. Ryan represents a fascinating specimen - a product of modern technology and today's culture - whose goal is almost the exact opposite of the "American dream." He doesn't want the house, the wife, or the children. He is almost estranged from his two sisters. And his relationships consist of one-night stands in airport hotels. He's a master at what he does yet, because of the way Clooney plays him, we sympathize with this guy, even though he thrives on the misery of others. All of the charisma and intelligence and wit almost make his lifestyle seem bizarrely desirable until those moments when the curtain is peeled back and we see the chilly loneliness that resides within Ryan's cupboard.

At times, Up in the Air looks and feels a little like a romantic comedy, but that's illusory. Ryan's relationship with Alex is a secondary plot - a way to illustrate things about him and to provide some tightly-scripted dialogue. (There is a brilliant sequence in which Alex and Natalie detail their very different expectations of the ideal mate.) The movie earns its ending; it may come as a surprise to some viewers, but it is foreshadowed and makes perfect sense in hindsight. Up in the Air never cheats and delivers an almost perfect mix of humor, satire, and underplayed drama.

(By the way, the first trailer for Up in the Air is excellent. It's extremely well put together and gives a sense of what the film is about without giving away specific plot elements. The second trailer is more conventional and not nearly as impressive. I have linked to the preferred one below - hopefully, the link stays active.)

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Up In The Air Review

15 Jan 2010

109 minutes

Up In The Air

As the anecdote goes, George Clooney took just one brisk read of the script, sat in one of the many bedrooms of his palatial villa on the tranquil shores of Lake Como, to say yes to Jason Reitman’s follow-up to hip, teen-pregnancy dramedy Juno. He could see it straightaway, the role of a lifetime. Or at least a role in his gifted hands that could be transformed into the role of his lifetime: this suave yet haunted jet-setter with a tincture of Cary Grant or perhaps George Clooney about him, intent on reaching a miraculous ten million air miles as he skips from city to city laying off the workforce on behalf of cowardly bosses. He’s a mobile downsizer, or ‘career transition counsellor’, thriving in the chaos of recession. Topical, huh?

Yes, of course, but not as polemic, but context — a gravitational pull anyone would wish to escape from. It’s worth mentioning the script, based on Walter Kirn’s novel, was six years old before going into production. Only once the shoot commenced did it take on such a cruel relevance. A consumerist fable with its synthetic dream of never-to-be-spent frequent-flyer miles, set against the bleak shadow of now.

But this all sounds far too heavy for a film so light. In Reitman’s care, still channelling the breezy, matter-of-fact perkiness of Juno, it is an emphatic statement that Hollywood can still make great movies; a celebration that stardom can be as thrilling a concept as 3-D or CG or mooncalf vampires.

Bingham has a system for life — he avoids it. He travels perfectly, flitting between meetings, sealed safe and selfish in business class. See how effortlessly he negotiates the hurdles of airport security. Hear his withering put-downs of the herds of clueless travellers. Yes, Up In The Air comes complete with a Clooney voice-over, one of modern cinema’s most beguiling pleasures. That wisdom-bestowing, aphoristic science-of-life stuff — just on the edge of droll — piloting us through Bingham’s handsome head. A philosophical voice track that crosses over into his motivational speeches: public demos of his ruthless, emotional impregnability. “We are not swans,” he chides a conventional hall part-filled with blank faces. “We are sharks.”

Two women will happen to Bingham in different ways. The first in what seems to be a traditional rom-com, is Vera Farmiga’s Alex. She proves his perfect opposite: the Hepburn to his sly-smiled Tracy, the female version of himself. She even wryly recognises the attraction: “Just think of me as you, but with a vagina.” Farmiga, who has a lived-in authenticity to her beauty, laps up Alex’s flighty ambiguities. Alex is loose on the airwaves too, and their first encounter is a duel of platinum reward cards — the jousting of battle scars from Jaws rewired for the age of hermetic travel. While Clooney gets the lines, the trajectory of the plot, the ravishing Farmiga has a range of subtle glances, ironic smiles and deft shrugs that suggest a world of emotion held sternly at bay.

It is not destiny, but scheduling that has drawn them together. Two people content to be casual. And love, the real grubby stuff of life, would only complicate things. You can see where this is going. Only you can’t. Not quite. Reitman keeps tweaking comfortable outcomes and throwing us off balance.

The other female is Natalie, a spiky greenhorn fresh in from business school with a computerised plan to downsize even the downsizers: a system of remote-control lay-offs via video. An indignant Bingham — confronting the grounding of his made-to-measure non-life — is forced to drag her around for his latest session of city-hopping redundancies. Thus, besides the rom-com, it’s an odd-couple flick: smug old-timer and mixed-up go-getter.

Anna Kendrick is the third of the film’s marvels. Natalie’s aiming for Bingham’s icy-calm, but can’t hold it in. Her swift, hilarious breakdown, including a splendid squall of unbidden tears in the midst of a departure hall, and Bingham’s allergic reaction supply the meat of the comedy. Reitman likes this bounce of opposites — Ellen Page ruffling Jennifer Garner’s stiff feathers in Juno — and their conversation has the zest of classic-era comedy.

Indeed, Billy Wilder would have loved its set-up, the barbs nestled amongst the folly of human foibles; Howard Hawks its complicated interplay between the sexes. To counter such glistening movieness, and sharpen its real-world subtext, Reitman interviewed 120 recently laid-off workers, sprinkling their candid words amongst the narrative — a Greek chorus of broken lives. The script is structured into city chapters, with these to-camera interviews slotted between, a shape as precise as the habits of the protagonist. As with Juno, there are contrivances, shortcuts to get us home on time. But they feel deliberate and confidently handled, part of that old-Hollywood style that courses beneath modern sheen.

Reitman also shoots with quiet power. Initially, it is cold and neat, all angular airport architecture and walls of icy glass, but as Bingham is unpeeled, so the director’s camera loosens up, switching to scruffy handhelds and grainier stock. There is plenty of aerial work, of course, gliding us through the sanctuary of the skies to peer godlike upon Midwestern cities more like burned-out circuit boards. In these strange, snowy centres of American torpor, where the recession has dug deepest, Bingham will do his thing. And the more we witness the sad ritual of dismissal, workers shorn of dignity and hope, the more we realise we’re getting the film all wrong.

This is one of the script’s brilliant tricks — to undermine our knee-jerk judgement of Bingham. We’ve got him pegged, this untouchable, steel-hearted hatchet man who will melt before the film’s out, but as he gently exposes the nature of his trade to his new sidekick, his understanding of grief and human panic reveal him as the most compassionate soul in the film. He is both executioner and therapist in one. And Clooney revels in the contradiction. Bingham isn’t emotionless — he’s just in control.

Much has and will be written on the close fit between Clooney and his charge: isolated, childless men, decent but unreachable, living their lives in the hushed unreality of airtight luxury. Everywhere and nowhere at once. Late on, Reitman changes tack for a chapter. Bingham, starting to soften, goes to his estranged sister’s (Melanie Lynskey) wedding, taking Alex as his date on a whim. Here, amid the touchstones of a forgotten childhood, he will prove unlikely saviour and the contact will pry him open. Without the lunatic twitches of some Method man, Clooney cracks the façade, and a mix of loneliness and hope pours out. He was right about this one — it has all the unguarded desperation of Michael Clayton, but is sexier, funnier and more knowing. He thrives off the film, and the film off his gift of a performance.

All the while Reitman, fast-tracking himself onto the A-list in a graceful swoop of excellence, is able to maintain that toughest of balances: the lightly profound, an unfussy, impeccably performed, romantic entertainment able to say something important about its times. Up In The Air is a rarity indeed, and should win Oscars for them all. One of which will look just dandy on the sideboard in Como.

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Up in the Air

Ryan's job is to travel around the country firing off people. When his boss hires Natalie, who proposes firing people via video conference, he tries to convince her that her method is a mistake.
Ryan Bingham is a corporate downsizing expert whose cherished life on the road is threatened just as he is on the cusp of reaching ten million frequent flyer miles, and just after he's met the frequent-traveller woman of his dreams.
Ryan Bingham flies around the country firing people. He's good at his job and is constantly in the air flying from one city to another. He's also an accumulator of frequent flyer miles and has a goal: he wants to get to ten million miles. His routine is interrupted by the arrival of Natalie Keener, who thinks the travel is unnecessary and the firings can be done through videoconferencing. Ryan's boss loves the idea, but wants Ryan to take Natalie on the road with him to show her how he does it. It proves to be a life lesson for Natalie after one of her counseling sessions goes wrong. Ryan also learns that some of the choices he's made have not always been the correct one. — garykmcd
Ryan Bingham's job is to fire people from theirs. The anguish, hostility, and despair of his "clients" has left him falsely compassionate, living out of a suitcase, and loving every second of it. When his boss hires arrogant young Natalie, she develops a method of video conferencing that will allow termination without ever leaving the office, essentially threatening the existence Ryan so cherishes. Determined to show the naive girl the error of her logic, Ryan takes her on one of his cross country firing expeditions, but as she starts to realize the disheartening realities of her profession, he begins to see the downfalls to his way of life. — The Massie Twins
Ryan Bingham works for Omaha-based Career Transition Counseling, whose contracts are in corporate downsizing. In other words, they fire people. Ryan is flying around the U.S. over three hundred twenty days of the year, which he feels is the best part of his job. He does whatever he can to rack up frequent flyer miles, the goal not to use them, but just to accumulate them to a specific number he has in his mind. A secondary job he has is to give motivational speeches on relieving one's life of excess physical and emotional baggage. He truly does believe what he espouses as he lives out of his carry-on suitcase (his apartment in Omaha is really in name only), he is not close to his siblings (although he does do a favor for his sister while on his travels), nor does he have or want a significant person in his life. Ryan's life may change when the company hires Natalie Keener, a young overachieving woman who recommends that the company change the nature of the work by conducting the "firings" via remote computer access. Ryan believes that Natalie does not fully understand the nature of the business, and as such, their boss, Craig Gregory, suggests that she accompany Ryan on a business trip. Ryan is also trying to protect his way of life, which now includes meeting up with a woman named Alex Goran whenever their flight schedules mesh. Like Ryan, Alex, who he met in an airport hotel bar, is constantly travelling for work, and is as equally turned on the by the concepts of "elite status" or "preferred member" as Ryan is. — Huggo
The opening credits roll over a montage of aerial shots of the ground as seen from an airplane in flight, as Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings sing "This Land Is Your Land." The plane lands and we see a series of talking heads -- people who have just been fired. Their reactions run the gamut from incredulousness and sadness to anger, and are directed at Ryan Bingham ( George Clooney ), who is sitting calmly behind a desk. He works for CTC, Career Transition Counseling. In a voice-over, Ryan introduces himself: "I work for another company that lends me out to pussies like Steve's boss, who don't have the balls to sack their own employees." There's a quick montage of retaliatory actions a disgruntled fired employee might engage in (pouring bleach in the coffee, sniper shooting), and we see Ryan offer a pat, sincere consolation to Steve, a fired employee. In a hotel room, experienced traveler Ryan expertly packs his suitcase. We see him drop off his rental car at an airport, bypassing the vacationers in the airport to check in at the frequent flyer desk, and powering through security with practiced moves as his voice-over lyrically describes the airport as his home. In first class, the stewardess asks him, "Cancer?" He looks at her quizzically. "Cancer?" He is confused, and she holds up a soft drink can, repeating, patiently: "Can, sir?" He shakes his head quickly and politely declines. Next, Ryan gives a motivational speech, "Unpacking Your Backpack," where he admonishes a thin crowd in a nondescript hotel meeting room to consider how uncomplicated their lives would be if they didn't have responsibility for so many things: knick-knacks, photos, furniture, homes, and relationships. "Imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing. It's kinda exhilarating, isn't it?" The crowd is underwhelmed. Back at the airport, Ryan strides into a frequent flyer lounge flashing his membership card, where he is cheerfully greeted. He calls his office and talks to Kevin, an assistant, who tells him that he has been invited to appear at GoalQuest XX in Las Vegas as a motivational speaker. Ryan is excited; GoalQuest is a very high-profile conference. He is transferred to his boss, Craig Gregory ( Jason Bateman ), who asks him to come back to Omaha by the end of the week for big news. In a Dallas Hilton bar, Ryan trades frequent traveler observations with an attractive blonde businesswoman, Alex Goran ( Vera Farmiga ). They compare perks cards, and she's impressed by his American Airlines Concierge Key. ("Carbon fiber?" she inquires. "Graphite," he responds modestly.) She mentions that she flies about 60,000 miles a year, and Ryan politely says, "Not bad." She challenges him to disclose his mileage number. The challenge turns into verbal foreplay as she teases him on the size of his number. "Is it this big?" (Holds hands a few inches apart.) "this big?" (Holds hands further apart.) He mentions that he has a lifetime mileage goal in mind, but won't say what it is. Later, they swap stories about the most outré places they have had sex, and she declares that she has done it in an airline lavatory on a regional flight. They end up in bed together, and later compare calendars to see if they will be in the same town sometime soon. She decides to return to her room, and he agrees that that would be the "ladylike thing to do." The next morning, he goes through what is obviously a routine: his workout in the hotel pool, a shoe shine, and the airport. While waiting for his plane, he receives a call from his sister Kara ( Amy Morton ), who is discussing the wedding of their sister Julie ( Melanie Lynskey ). Kara is sending him a cardboard cutout of Julie and her fiancé because Julie wants him to take a photo of the cutout in Las Vegas at the Luxor pyramid. He reluctantly agrees. Omaha: Voice-over: "Last year I spent 322 days on the road, which meant I spent 43 miserable days at home." Ryan enters his small studio apartment, which has less personality than a hotel room: minimal utilitarian furniture, no decorations. His neighbor, a diffident young woman, brings over a package that she has signed for: the cutout that his sister wants him to photograph. He invites his neighbor over, and she awkwardly declines, telling him that she is now seeing someone. Ryan is unconcerned. At a staff meeting, Craig is chortling that the economic downturn has created a wonderful opportunity for their firm, and introduces Natalie Keener ( Anna Kendrick ), a fresh young up-and-comer who has recently graduated at the top of her class at Cornell. Natalie introduces an on-line monitor that will be used to fire people from a remote location over the internet, eliminating the need for human resource specialists such as Ryan to travel. Ryan is appalled at the impersonality of the process -- and, we suspect, at the loss of his travel privileges. After the meeting, he goes to Craig's office to protest. Natalie joins them, and Ryan tells her that she knows nothing of the realities of firing a person. She brightly tells him that she majored in psychology, and Ryan challenges her to fire him. She takes on the challenge, and tries to fire him, failing miserably. Later, Craig accuses him of not being a team player and becoming a dinosaur. Craig tells Ryan that Natalie will be accompanying him on the road for the next few days to learn the ropes, much to Ryan's chagrin. At home, Ryan packs for another road trip -- his shelves are as sparse as his apartment, utilitarian, containing nothing that is not traveling business attire. He is chagrined when he realizes that he has to carry the cut-out, which does not quite fit into his luggage. At the airport, he checks in with his usual efficiency, and then sighs when he sees Natalie arriving with a large, impractical suitcase. He forces her to buy a suitcase that will fit in the overhead compartment, telling her that he flies over 370 days a year, and that not checking luggage saves him the equivalent of a week a year. He ruthlessly pares her packing, tossing things he deems unnecessary into the trash. In the security line, he gives her the benefit of his traveling experience: Never get behind families or old people and try to find an Asian, because Asians travel light, wear slip-on shoes, and therefore move through security faster. Natalie: "That's racist!" Ryan: "I stereotype -- it's faster." St. Louis: Alex calls Ryan as Ryan and Natalie are heading for the car rental. She's in Atlanta, and they try to match up overlapping time somewhere. They agree to meet at SDF (Louisville). Ryan and Natalie enter another office and begin their job of firing people. Natalie is instructed to stay quiet and simply hand them their benefits package, but she can't resist piping up with an inanity when a man called Bob ( J.K. Simmons ) asks what his family is supposed to do when he is on unemployment. Ryan, who has taken the time to read Bob's resume, rescues the interview by helping him realize that this is an opportunity for him to follow his dream of being a chef. Bob leaves, resigned but less angry. Ryan bypasses a long line of people to check in at the Hilton Honors desk. An irate customer protests that Ryan just waltzed to the front of the line, but a smiling desk clerk tells her, "We reserve priority assistance for our Hilton Honors members!" Ryan helpfully hands the customer a brochure, and, still irate, she snatches it from him. At dinner with Natalie, Ryan orders several dinners to use up his $40 per diem. Natalie is surprised, and he tells her that he tries not to spend a nickel that doesn't go towards his frequent flyer miles. She asks why, and he tells her that he is aiming for ten million miles. She scoffs at what she deems to be a meaningless hobby, but he points out that that he would be only the seventh person to attain that level, and goes on to describe the award: lifetime executive status, meeting the chief pilot, Maynard Finch, and getting his name painted on the side of a plane. Natalie is unimpressed, and declares that if she had those miles, she'd show up at the airport, pick a place, and go. That evening, in bed, Ryan looks at his sister's wedding invitation. He receives text messages from Alex that quickly become sexually suggestive. He responds, smiles, and turns out the light. The next morning, Natalie helps Ryan by taking a photo of the cutout in front of the St. Louis airport. She doesn't understand the significance of the airport, and Ryan explains "the Wright Brothers flew here!" and goes on to ask Natalie if she never wondered why Charles Lindbergh's plane was called Spirit of St. Louis. Dismissively, she tells him no, she never wondered. Wichita: Another office. Another firing, but the employee is angry. Afterwards, Ryan tells Natalie that sometimes, they just need to vent. Natalie is taken aback, but wants to try firing the next person, who at first appears to take the news calmly, but then announces in the same calm fashion that "There's this beautiful bridge by my house. I'm going to go jump off it." Natalie is distraught, and races from the building. Ryan reassures her that people say all sorts of things while they are being fired, and never mean them. Kansas City: They enter an office that has been decimated -- only a few employees remain, and the receptionist is resigned when she sees them. In the hotel, Ryan overhears Natalie talking to her boyfriend as she declares, "I don't even think of him that way -- he's OLD." Ryan is taken aback. Alex joins him, and they enter a hotel room. Des Moines: Another office, another firing. Natalie is starting to feel the emotional strain. Miami: Ryan is giving another motivational talk, which he continues with the same allusion to getting rid of human connections, because relationships are the heaviest components of their lives. He declares, "The slower we move, the faster we die . . . we're sharks, we have to keep moving." Returning to the hotel, Natalie challenges Ryan about never getting married. He declares he is never getting married, and invites her to try to sell him on the idea of marriage. He's not buying. As they continue the discussion in the hotel lobby, Ryan wraps up the argument by declaring "make no mistake, we all die alone." Natalie suddenly dissolves in great sobbing tears and announces that her boyfriend, Bryan, has left her. As she falls sobbing into Ryan's arms, he sees Alex descending the stairs. Ryan introduces Alex to Natalie, and over drinks, Alex commiserates with Natalie: "He broke up with you by text? What a prick!" Ryan slyly agrees: "Almost as bad as being fired by internet." Natalie glares at him. Natalie goes on to tell them that she moved to Omaha to follow Bryan, giving up a good job offer in San Francisco, and goes on to lament that no matter how much success she might have professionally, it won't matter unless she finds the right guy. She has a mental schedule of deadlines that she had hoped to accomplish, and earnestly declares that she could have made her relationship with Bryan work because he met most of her requirements. Alex and Ryan smile and tell her that deadlines pretty much go out the window after a certain age. Alex goes on to explain that at 34, her expectations for a man have radically changed and describes the kind of man she'd like. Ryan listens with interest. Natalie observes that "that's depressing. We should just date women." Alex says, matter-of-factly, "Tried that. We're no picnic ourselves," to Ryan's surprise. Natalie says that she doesn't want to settle, and Alex tells her that she's young, so settling seems like failure. Natalie declares, earnestly, that is IS failure, by definition. As they return to their rooms, Natalie asks what the plans for the evening are. Alex and Ryan are taken aback and had obviously not expected to include her in their plans. Ryan announces that they are going to hit the party for the tech conference that is being held in the hotel. Natalie says that she didn't know they were registered, and Alex and Ryan hem and haw until Natalie realizes that they are planning to crash the party, at which point she enthusiastically declares, "I'm in!" They casually walk up to the registration desk, grab some unclaimed badges, and enter the party. Natalie has inadvertently picked up a name tag for Jennifer Chu, but Ryan assures her that no one will notice. Natalie quickly downs a few drinks and begins to mingle, meeting a man called Dave. (This is a reference to Natalie's list of preferences in a boyfriend -- one of the odder items was "a one-syllable name like Matt or ... Dave.") Ryan and Alex dance. The MC comes on stage to sing and gets the crowd amped up. Later, Ryan offers Alex his hotel room key, "the key to my place," and Alex takes it, commenting lightly that she didn't realize they were at that point in their relationship. On an evening boat ride with other members of the conference, Natalie sings karaoke and Ryan and Alex sit at the back of the boat talking. Alex tells Ryan that she never has a chance to act this way at home, and asks him about his motivational philosophy: "Is the bag empty because you hate people or you hate the baggage that they come with?" He comments that recently, he's been thinking about emptying the backpack, and what he'd put back in it. He smiles, they kiss and at that moment, the boat loses power. A speedboat rescues them and ferries them to shore, where they have to splash through the surf to the beach. Laughing and drenched, the crowd scurries into the hotel. The next morning, Ryan wakes to see Alex finishing getting dressed -- she has stayed the night. She says that if she catches a standby, she can make a meeting in Cincinnati. Ryan looks momentarily disappointed, and she chides him playfully, "Oh, I made you feel cheap!" They laugh, and as she leaves, Ryan tells her, "Hey -- I really like you." At breakfast at a poolside table, Natalie tries to apologize for what she might have said or done the night before, and Ryan tells her that it was good to see her cut loose. He then asks her if she woke him up or slipped out (referring to the man she picked up at the party). Natalie admits that she just slipped out, and Ryan observes, "the protocol's always tricky." As they are taking another picture of the cutout against the Miami skyline, Natalie asks Ryan questions about Alex, finally asking, "so, what kind of relationship do you have?" He tells her that it's casual, and Natalie asks if there's a future. Ryan tells that he hadn't thought about it, but Natalie becomes annoyed. Ryan tries to explain: "You know that moment when you look into someone's eyes and you can feel them staring into your soul and the whole world goes quiet just for a second?" Natalie nods, "Yes!" Ryan declares, "Yeah, well, I don't." Angrily, Natalie throws down the cutout on the dock and declares that he's an asshole, Alex might be a chance at a real relationship, and then goes on to tell him that his philosophy is bullshit, he has a "cocoon of self-banishment" and that he has set up a way of life that makes it impossible for him to have any kind of human connection. She storms off, and the cutout blows into the water. Ryan tries to reach it, but falls into the water, too. Back in his room, he carefully blow dries the picture, but safely tucked in the suitcase on the way to Detroit, it is a bit worse for wear. Detroit: Ryan warns Natalie that Detroit is a rough town and that the employees are touchy and will be difficult. When they enter the office, Ryan is surprised to see a computer monitor sitting on the table. Craig greets them from the screen -- he has arranged for a trial run of the internet-based firing procedure. They will be at a desk in the next room, but will only talk to the employees via screen. Natalie takes the first employee. At first, he is belligerent -- they can hear him bellowing in the next room through the thin walls -- but he later starts to sob disconsolately. Natalie is distressed, but hides it behind some stock encouraging phrases. She sends the employee away, and takes a deep breath. Craig has been monitoring the exchange, and is thoughtful. Ryan tells her, unconvincingly, that she did good as she looks forlornly at the list of employees -- this was the first of over fifty employees that will be released. In the parking lot, Natalie leans against the car as Ryan talks to Craig, trying to convince him that they are still needed on the road. After the conversation, he resignedly tells Natalie that Craig has called them off the road: "We're going home." At the airport, Ryan stares out the large plate glass window, gazing at an airplane that has a large white area on the side, just waiting for a name to be painted on it. He looks at his sister's wedding invitation, and realizes that the date is this weekend and he has never returned the RSVP card. As they walk through the airport, Natalie tries to apologize for what she said about Alex, and Ryan ungraciously accepts her apology. Suddenly, he turns and tells Natalie that he will meet her in Omaha, but he's got to catch another flight. Las Vegas: Ryan meets Alex and gets the requested photo of the cutout in front of the Luxor pyramid. Ryan invites Alex to his sister's wedding in Wisconsin. Surprised, Alex demurs, but finally agrees, and they fly into Milwaukee. Northern Wisconsin: At the Chalet, a pseudo-Tyrolean motel, Ryan and Alex wait in the check-in line. Seeing a clerk behind the desk, Ryan asks her if she is free, but she condescendingly tells him, "This line is only for members of our Matterhorn program!" As he enters his room with Alex, his sister Kara comes out of her room, and he introduces Alex to Kara. Kara is surprised: "Ryan has told me . . . nothing about you." She tells him that she is staying at the hotel because she and her husband are having a trial separation, and reminds him of the rehearsal dinner that evening. At dinner, Julie is pleased to see Ryan and meet Alex. She proudly shows off a small, diamond chip ring that her fiancé Jim designed, and introduces Jim ( Danny McBride ), who is friendly in an awkward sort of way. Ryan offers her the photos that he has taken, and she asks him to pin them to a map that contains dozens and dozens of photos. Ryan has a hard time fitting his in. They explain that all of Jim's money is tied up in a real estate investment and made a honeymoon unfeasible financially, so the photos would be the next best thing. After the dinner, Ryan offers to walk Julie down the aisle the next day since their dad isn't around, but embarrassed, she gently refuses, telling him that Jim's uncle will be escorting her. Ryan is somewhat hurt, but puts a good face on it and tells her that he just wanted to make sure she was covered. Julie is distressed that she might have hurt his feelings but when he asks when he should be at the church, she tells him, "Well, guests are supposed to be there at 5:00 so, 5:00 would be good," again relegating him to the status of a mere guest. The next day, Alex and Ryan break into the local school so that Ryan can show her around. He points out his state basketball championship photo in the trophy case. Alex is surprised, and they end up kissing on the make-out stairs behind the gym. They sit down to watch a practice, but his cell phone rings: It's Kara, who tells him that hes needed at the church. Alex drops him off at the church and returns to the hotel to grab his suit. Julie is distraught because Jim has gotten cold feet. Kara wants him to talk to Jim, but Ryan points out that he might not be the best one, because his job is to tell people how to avoid commitment. "What kind of fucked up message is that?" exclaims Kara. "It could have helped you," he retorts, referring to her separation, but reluctantly agrees to talk to Jim. He finds him in a Sunday school classroom reading The Velveteen Rabbit. Jim tells him that he began to think about what his life was going to be like: house, children, jobs, losing his hair, and then dying, and wonders what the point is. Ryan observes that a good marriage is something that people aspire to, but Jim points out that Ryan was never married, and that he seems happier than anyone else he knows. Ryan agrees that there's no point to it all, but points out that the most important moments of his life had other people involved, and observes that life is better with company, with a co-pilot. Jim accepts this, and then asks "What's it like out there?" Ryan admits that Julie is upset. Jim comes out and apologizes to Julie, asking her "Will you be my co-pilot?" Julie tearfully agrees, and the wedding proceeds. Alex and Ryan hold hands during the vows, and dance intimately at the reception. At the airport, Alex asks when she will see Ryan again and Ryan tells her that she's going to have to come visit him, since he's been essentially grounded. She moves to her gate and tells him to "call me when you get lonely." As she walks away, he calls out, "I'm lonely." She laughs, and keeps walking. In Omaha, back at his apartment, he puts his things away, and looks around, dissatisfied. He opens the refrigerator to reveal an impressive collection of airline miniature booze bottles in the refrigerator door. At the office the next morning, Natalie proudly shows him around the call center that is being beta tested, and comments that the workers are called "termination engineers. I wanted to call them Terminators, but was that bumped by Legal." "I can't imagine why," Ryan responds drily. Ryan sits at a desk and distastefully tries on a headset. He checks the internet for the schedule for GoalQuest XX, and sees when he is scheduled to speak. Las Vegas: Ryan prepares for his speech, and as he is introduced to a crowd of several hundred, he takes the podium with his backpack. He begins the spiel that we have heard before but then stops and gazes out over the audience. He looks down at the podium, shakes his head ruefully, excuses himself, and walks out, to the consternation of the event organizers. He dashes through the airport and catches a flight to Chicago, where he arrives in the evening. Chicago: In a hurry, Ryan steps out of his routine and drives away without giving the car clerk his rewards card. He pulls up in front of Alex's townhouse and rings the doorbell. Alex comes to the door. She is shocked as he says, smiling, "So, I was in the neighborhood . . ." Suddenly, he hears children arguing and we see them running in the hall behind Alex. Ryan begins to back away, and with a stricken look on Alex's face, we hear a male voice ask, "Who's at the door, honey?" She closes the door gently as she responds, "Just someone asking directions." At the hotel, Ryan sits on a bed in a darkened room with a drink, staring out into the evening. On the train to the airport the next morning, he receives a call from Alex, who demands, "What were you thinking, showing up at my door like that?" He protests that he didn't know she was married, and she declares that he could have seriously messed up her "real life," and that she thought he understood. He said that he thought he was part of her real life, and asks her to help him understand. She tells him that he is an escape, an escape from their normal lives, a "parenthesis." "A parenthesis?" he repeats, dully. Alex is unapologetic. "Well, what did you want? If you want to see me again, give me a call." He hangs up on her gently. In the air: Returning to Omaha, Ryan is gazing out the window when the flight attendant comes on the intercom to excitedly announce that they are flying over Dubuque, which means that a startled Ryan has hit the 10 million miles mark. Champagne is brought for all the first class passengers, and Chief Pilot Maynard Finch ( Sam Elliott ) greets Ryan. He sits in the seat next to Ryan and congratulates him, telling him that he's the youngest yet to get to 10 million. He pulls out the special silver card, engraved Ryan Bingham, #7, and presents it to Ryan, telling him that they really appreciate Ryan's loyalty. Ryan is speechless, and tells the Captain that he forgot what he always wanted to say at that moment. The Captain asks him where he's from, and Ryan, looking down, says softly, "I'm from here." Omaha: In his office, Ryan looks at his card, and, making a decision, dials the number on the card. He is greeted with a cheery "Good morning, Mr. Bingham!" Surprised, he asks how they knew it was him, and is told that it's his dedicated line. He begins to make arrangements to transfer miles to Julie and Jim for an around-the-world trip, which costs half-a-million miles each. Craig comes into his office and asks him if he remembers a Karen Barnes whom Natalie fired. Ryan says that they have fired dozens of people, and he doesn't remember. Craig tells him that Karen jumped off a bridge and killed herself, and he needs to know if she gave any indication of her intentions, which could get them into trouble legally. Ryan says he doesn't remember anything, and asks if Natalie is all right. Craig tells him that Natalie quit by sending him a text message. "Fucking nice, right? Nobody has any manners anymore," he grouses, and goes on to tell Ryan that he is returning the workforce to the field. San Francisco: Natalie is interviewing for the job she was offered when she first graduated from Cornell. The interviewer asks her why she went to Omaha, and she reluctantly admits that "I followed a boy." After a few searching questions, the interviewer shows Natalie a letter of recommendation that he has received from Ryan. The letter is glowing, and the interviewer offers her the job. A montage of interview clips follows. Employees whom we have seen being fired throughout the movie are in some sort of interview/counseling session. Each in their own way, they explain that while losing their job was difficult, it was made easier by the support of their friends and families. Ryan enters an airport, suitcase in tow, and comes to stand in front of a large Departures and Arrivals board, gazing at the flight details. He releases the suitcase and stands in front of the board with no baggage. We hear Ryan's voice-over: "Tonight, most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and squealing kids. Their spouses will ask about their day, and tonight they'll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places and one of those lights, slightly brighter than rest, will be my wingtip passing over." The credits roll over a view of early evening blue clouds as seen below from an airplane, with a faint sunset in the far distance.

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War Is Hell, Ain’t It?

For a movie that set off a firestorm with its trailer, Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’ is surprisingly bereft of any major commentary—choosing instead to merely drop the viewer into a war zone and see what happens

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“What’s so civil about war, anyway?” asked Axl Rose back in 1990, when he and his band had the world’s ear. Nobody would accuse Guns N’ Roses of being a political act like, say, U2, but releasing a single that paid homage to Martin Luther King Jr. while critiquing America’s misadventures in Vietnam was a risky move, especially considering the core demographics of their fan base. For extra pop-cultural cred, “Civil War” sampled the villainous prison warden played by Strother Martin in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke , whose ominously drawled warning of “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate” became a sort of sinister catchphrase —a euphemism suggesting progressive rhetoric wrapped around authoritarian brutality like barbed wire. It’s less that Martin’s character is worried about being understood than that he doesn’t want his charges to talk back.

Alex Garland’s Civil War is a movie with a failure to communicate, though not for lack of trying; its maker understands the visual and rhetorical language of agitprop, but he has such a limited vocabulary as a dramatist—and such a narrow agenda as a provocateur—that it doesn’t matter. There is a significant difference between movies that are polarizing because they ask difficult questions and ones that are simply designed to be divisive, and Civil War belongs decisively in the second category. Not only does the film’s depiction of a near-future America smoldering in the wreckage of its own colliding kamikaze ideologies feel borrowed from a number of other sources, but it also rings hollow, precisely because its vision of violent social collapse is so derivative. In attempting to make a movie largely about the ethical dimension of image making—a dilemma experienced by a group of war correspondents wandering through a country that’s become its own private twilight zone—Garland succeeds mostly in exposing his own limitations. He’s a pulp merchant, a purveyor of high-toned exploitation trying his best to strip-mine an anxious election-year zeitgeist while there’s still time.

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Officially, Civil War is an original screenplay, just like 2014’s Ex Machina , the wryly funny, sexily technophobic Bluebeard riff that positioned him as, if not the new Stanley Kubrick, then at least a worthy pretender. Like a lot of successful genre filmmakers—including his countryman Christopher Nolan—Garland is an inveterate magpie, subsuming aesthetic and conceptual material from a range of sources into his own vision. And whatever one thinks of films like Annihilation or Men , they are movies with a vision—carefully engineered acts of world-building suffused with atmosphere and punctuated by striking, unsettling moments. Which is why it’s all the stranger that right from the very beginning the storytelling language of Civil War feels so totally borrowed, including a pair of brazen allusions tilting toward copycatting more than homage. The first is a prologue nodding to the opening of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in which the president of the United States (Nick Offerman) nervously rehearses a none-too-convincing victory speech from behind barricaded doors; the more he talks about his government’s impending triumph over insurgent forces—specifically, a coalition led by the state governments of Florida and Texas—the more he looks and sounds like a cornered rat. The second reference is even more on the nose: At a rally in downtown New York City, a suicide bomber clad in an American flag ignites a booby-trapped backpack, resulting in carnage whose gory imagery and stylized, ear-ringing sound design are indebted to Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men .

It’s worth noting that Fahrenheit 9/11 and Children of Men are keynote works of what could be called post-9/11 cinema— an early-millennial period when both serious and satirical American filmmakers were aligned in trying to criticize (or, in Moore’s case, outright topple) the Dubya White House. With his smug frat-boy countenance and aides who dated back to Nixon, Bush II was the poster boy for “America: Fuck yeah” and a perfect symbolic scapegoat for filmmakers running the gamut from Gus Van Sant to Sacha Baron Cohen. Two decades later, Hollywood obviously still leans mostly to the left, but the terms of engagement have changed. One thing that Barack Obama and Donald Trump had in common was that while their presidencies were both lightning rods for extremist criticism, they didn’t yield much in the way of memorable or great cinema. The closest thing to a cogent popular political allegory in that period was the ever-reliable Purge franchise, which imagined a silent, seething majority perpetually counting down the hours until a preordained, murderous, insurrectionist return of the repressed.

There’s a potentially great, cathartic dark comedy to be made about the psychology of an event like the Capitol attack of January 6, or about the dangers of unchecked autocracy manifesting as common-sense, anti-woke populism (among his myriad outrageous policy moves, Offerman’s commander in chief apparently opted to gift himself with a third term). Garland, though, is not the guy to thread that particular needle: Where a director like Jordan Peele is able to channel seriousness through sketch-comedy absurdism (including Get Out ’s earlier and superior three-term president joke), Garland doubles down on the idea that he’s doing important work. The strain is palpable. In interviews, the director has explained that Civil War was originally written before January 6 but that the shadow of the insurrection still fell over the production; talking to Dazed , he admitted that he could “detect [it] around the set” and that the bad vibes gave the production “a greater sense of anger.” It’s an interesting observation insofar as the finished film doesn’t so much seethe with rage as ooze a kind of cynical resignation—the sort that comes when a filmmaker either considers himself to be above his subject matter or isn’t being honest about his relationship to the material.

There’s certainly some kind of irony in a guy whose best work—2012’s Dredd , which Garland cowrote and produced with director Pete Travis—is an (exhilarating) exercise in hyperbolic carnage suddenly producing a sanctimonious statement against violence, but otherwise, Civil War doesn’t seem to come from a particularly personal place. Garland’s fascination with female protagonists over the years is laudable, but, as in Annihilation and Men , he can seem to conceive women only in terms of lack: The main character here is a veteran shutterbug named Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) who’s grown so inured to the sight of death and decay—and her role in sharing it with an increasingly information-starved public—that she’s basically a zombie. If that’s not enough of a cliché, she’s been given a younger kindred spirit as a combination apprentice and surrogate daughter: Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a 20-ish wannabe war correspondent whose lack of worldliness is her defining characteristic. Jessie isn’t a character, but a device; her job will be to carry the torch for journalistic integrity after her mentor (inevitably) meets her demise in the line of duty.

Lest that last bit seem like a spoiler, Civil War is the sort of movie in which hard-edged professionals grimly sit around prophesying their own fates. And although Lee’s arc is predictable, the flatness of the role is no fault of Dunst’s; like Jessie Buckley in Men , the actress inhabits Garland’s barren idea of dramaturgy so fully that she occasionally draws us all the way in with her. Spaeny, meanwhile, is livelier than she was as an anesthetized princess in Priscilla , yet Jessie isn’t much more than a cipher—a device through which we witness a series of showdowns between characters of different allegiances or tableaux testifying to the sheer photogenic brokenness of the social contract. In structural terms, Civil War is a road movie, with Lee and Jessie traveling from New York to Washington in the company of two other members of the fifth estate: a hard-drinking (and, it’s implied, possibly sexually predatory) reporter, Joel (Wagner Moura), and an ex-op-ed specialist, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), both of whom have inside information on the embattled president’s location and hopes of scoring a final interview before he’s toppled once and for all.

Civil War has been set up so that each successive rest stop bristles with a different kind of anxiety. Stopping for gas means encountering a garage’s worth of bloody strung-up dissidents, displayed like trophies for rubberneckers. Despite traveling with the word “press” emblazoned on their van and flak jackets, Lee and her merry band aren’t insulated from the surrounding dangers, and on a few occasions, they even go looking for trouble: A firefight in an abandoned apartment complex eventually finds Jessie growing into her point-and-click instincts. (The juxtaposition of different kinds of “shooting” in this movie is relentless, a pale imitation of motifs developed in Full Metal Jacket , which, like all of Kubrick’s provocations, understood the relationship between savagery and satire.)

A couple of the set pieces are effective, like an idyll in a Lynchian small town whose smiling inhabitants seem oblivious to the larger conflict (the punchline is Garland’s best and shiveriest sight gag), or a pitched battle between snipers whose worldview no longer extends beyond their own scopes. But there are also risible bits, like a nighttime drive through a forest fire where the floating, burning embers are meant as signifiers of some terrible, fatalistic beauty—a scene that, however well shot, practically vibrates with banality. And then there’s the bit featuring a wandering platoon of disillusioned, trigger-happy soldiers—a device Garland used as far back as 28 Days Later —led by a deadpan Jesse Plemons, clad in red heart-shaped shades that mock the idea of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. “What kind of Americans are you?” he asks our heroes, who, having found themselves on the wrong end of the barrel, don’t know how to answer.

The failure to communicate is ominous, but the question (and its consequences) might be even scarier if we knew what kind of America Civil War took place in. Last month at South by Southwest, Garland got in some trouble when he said that “left and right are ideological arguments about how to run a state” and that he didn’t consider either to be “good or bad.” The statement may have been twisted in bad faith by the media (another irony considering the film’s faith in journalists as truth tellers), but at a minimum, it still suggests a filmmaker who doesn’t want to get his hands dirty with such crass things as sociopolitical specifics.

It may be that trying to fill in the blanks of how the sort of scenario depicted in Civil War could come to pass is a fool’s errand—an invitation to criticism that would weaken an already rickety conceptual infrastructure. (Exhibit A: a fleeting mention of “The Antifa Massacre,” which sounds more like a band name than a possible flashpoint.) But would it really be worse than using America’s current political strife as a coy structuring absence? Would it be worse than Garland acting as if such avoidance makes him the adult in the room? The ostensibly outrageous climax, meanwhile, features sequences of urban warfare meant to drop jaws, but these scenes point in such an obvious direction that the suspense is flattened while the audience is simply flattered into acquiescence. There are a number of genuinely profound movies whose thesis boils down to “war is hell,” several less expensive or pretentious than Civil War , but typically they arrive there honestly, and only after challenging their audience. Civil War , which is somehow simultaneously pedantic and frictionless, feels weirdly like a movie of the moment that won’t last—a victory lap around an observation that was already made by Axl Rose.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.

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Anyone who’s ever played tennis knows the game starts with love and escalates fast. In Luca Guadagnino ’s hip, sexy and ridiculously overheated “ Challengers ,” the rivals are former doubles partners Art Donaldson ( Mike Faist ) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), best friends since the age of 12, who went their separate ways after both players fell for the same woman. Patrick got there first, but Art wound up marrying her — and their sense of competition has only intensified since.

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“I’m no homewrecker,” Tashi teases Art and Patrick the night they meet her, 13 years earlier. Constructed like a tennis competition, Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay ricochets back and forth through time, asking us to pivot our brains the way audiences do at the movie’s opening challenger match. (In pro tennis, challenger events are like the minor leagues, where second-tier talents prove themselves.) This one frames the film, as Tashi seems torn between her husband and his old partner.

Watching from the stands, their legs splayed indecently wide, the pair ogle Tashi as the wind whips her short skirt up in the air. None of this is accidental: not the way Jonathan Anderson (as in J.W. Anderson, switching from catwalks to costume design in his first feature credit) showcases Zendaya’s gazelle-like legs, not the way DP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom frames the boys’ crotches, and certainly not the moment Patrick squeezes his pal’s leg as Tashi shows them how, at its most beautiful, the game can be an ecstatic experience.

Later that night, at an Adidas-sponsored party for Tashi, the guys take turns trying to get her number. They’re motivated by hormones. She’s more strategic (the sheer control involved in Zendaya’s performance is astonishing, transforming this would-be trophy into the one who sets the rules). “You don’t know what tennis is,” Tashi challenges Patrick, going on to explain, “It’s a relationship.” Lines like this, which spell everything out in blinking neon lights, run throughout Kuritzkes’ script. But Guadagnino’s execution is all about subtext, calibrating things such that body language speaks volumes.

The same goes for what promises to be the year’s hottest scene, back in the boys’ hotel room, as Tashi sits on the bed between the two and coaxes — or coaches — them to make out. “Challengers” is not a gay film per se, but it leaves things ambiguous enough that one could read it like Lukas Dhont’s recent “Close,” about a friendship so tight, the boys’ peers tease them for it.

Over the course of 131 minutes, “Challengers” volleys between what amounts to a romantic rematch and intimate earlier vignettes. At all times, even off-screen, Tashi remains the fulcrum. In the present, Art — whose torso shows signs of multiple surgeries — has been on a cold streak, which betrays a loss of passion for the game. Passion’s no problem for Patrick, who’s more confident in both his swing and his sexuality.

The film calls for intensely physical performances from the two male actors, who both appear wobbly and exhausted by the end. Faist (a Broadway star whom “West Side Story” introduced to moviegoers) has a relatively traditional character arc, patiently waiting his turn and evolving as the timeline progresses. O’Connor (whose smoldering turn in gay indie “God’s Own Country” got him cast on “The Crown”) comes across as animalistic and immature by comparison, as his bad-boy character refuses to grow up or give up.

Another filmmaker might have subtracted himself in order to foreground the story, whereas Guadagnino goes big, leading with style (and a trendy score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). In keeping with the athletic theme, he does all kinds of wild things with the camera, including a composition framed from the umpire’s perspective mid-court that zooms along the net to find Tashi in the crowd. Occasionally, she and other characters smack the fluorescent yellow balls directly at the screen, making us flinch in our seats. By the end, “Challengers” has assumed the ball’s POV — or maybe it’s the racket’s — as Guadagnino immerses audiences in the film’s climactic match.

Far from your typical sports movie, “Challengers” is less concerned with the final score than with the ever-shifting dynamic between the players. The pressure mounts and the perspiration pours, as the pair once known as “Fire and Ice” face off again. Whether audiences identify as Team Patrick or Team Art, Guadagnino pulls a risky yet effective trick, essentially scoring the winning shot himself.

Reviewed at AMC Century City 15, Los Angeles, April 9, 2024. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 131 MIN.

Production: Amazon MGM presentation of a Why Are You Acting?, Frenesy Films, Pascal Pictures production. Producers: Amy Pascal, Luca Guadagnino, Zendaya, Rachel O’Connor. Executive producers: Bernard Bellew, Lorenzo Mieli, Kevin Ulrich.
Crew: Director: Luca Guadagnino. Camera: Sayonbhu Mukdeeprom. Editor: Marco Costa. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross. Music supervisor: Robin Urdang.
With: Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist.

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Screen Rant

What time star wars: the bad batch season 3, episode 12 releases on disney plus.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 3, episode 12 will move the show into its final stretch, and remains consistent with prior release times on Disney+.

Omega's capture by Hemlock's clone sets the stage for a thrilling rescue mission by Hunter, Wrecker, and Crosshair in The Bad Batch season 3.
Expect tensions to rise between Hunter and Crosshair due to the latter's failure to safeguard Omega from the Empire in The Bad Batch episode 11.
The upcoming episode of The Bad Batch promises intense action and drama as the team races against time to free Omega from the Empire's clutches.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 3, episode 12 will move the show into its home stretch, leading many to wonder when exactly it begins streaming on Disney+. The ending of The Bad Batch season 3, episode 11 was suitably tragic, with Omega being taken once more by the Empire. The return of Asajj Ventress to Star Wars saw Clone Force 99 adequately warned about the Empire's threat to Pabu, yet the team did not have enough time to vacate the planet.

As teased in Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 3's trailer , Omega was captured by one of Hemlock's C-X2 clones and returned to the Empire. This will allow Hemlock and his associates to continue tests using Omega's blood, something that has proven integral to Star Wars' Project Necromancer and Palpatine's resurrection . Given this turn of events, it is expected that Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 3, episode 12 will reignite Hunter, Wrecker, and Crosshair's search for Mount Tantiss in a bid to save Omega , raising excitement for the episode's release on Disney+.

Upcoming Star Wars Shows: Story, Casts & Everything We Know

What time the bad batch season 3, episode 12 releases.

As has been the case for the prior 11 episodes, Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 3, episode 12 will be released on Disney+ at 12:00 AM PT, 03:00 AM ET, and 08:00 AM BST. This marks no change in The Bad Batch 's air time, as the show maintains consistency with each episode. It is expected that these release times will continue for all Star Wars animated TV shows, including the newly-announced Tales of the Empire story which is animated in the same style as The Bad Batch and The Clone Wars before it.

What To Expect From Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 3, Episode 12

Hunter, wrecker, and crosshair will be on the warpath to recover omega from the empire's clutches..

Another potential subplot could be a rise in tensions between Hunter and Crosshair.

Concerning what to expect from the story of The Bad Batch season 3, episode 12, it will likely follow on from episode 11's cliffhanger. Omega is now back in the hands of the Empire, likely meaning her three brothers will stop at nothing to save her . The early episodes of The Bad Batch season 3 focused on the titular team trying to find the location of Mount Tantiss to free Omega, meaning this will likely resume now that the latter has been captured once more. Another potential subplot could be a rise in tensions between Hunter and Crosshair.

Crosshair allowed Omega to turn herself over to the Empire in The Bad Batch season 3, episode 11, as she trusted him to fire a tracker onto C-X2's ship. However, Crosshair failed to hit the vehicle, something that will surely anger Hunter, as will Crosshair's decision to let Omega get herself captured in the first place. As such, more bickering and anger can be expected between the two clones in Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 3, episode 12, harkening back to Crosshair's reintroduction to the group in earlier episodes of the season.

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

*Availability in US

Not available

Star Wars: The Bad Batch is an action-adventure animated series set after the events of The Clone Wars, following Clone Force 99 (a.k.a. the Bad Batch.) Finding themselves immune to the brainwashing effects of Order 66, the Bad Batch become mercenaries for hire while outrunning the empire, now seeing them as fugitives of the law.

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COMMENTS

Up in the Air movie review & film summary (2009)
When corporations need to downsize quickly but hate the mess, he flies in and breaks the news to the new former employees. In hard times, his business is great. This isn't a comedy. If it were, it would be hard to laugh in these last days of 2009. Nor is it a tragedy. It's an observant look at how a man does a job.
Up in the Air
Movie Info. An idea from a young, new co-worker (Anna Kendrick) would put an end to the constant travel of corporate downsizer Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), so he takes her on a tour to ...
Up in the Air (2009)
Permalink. "Up In the Air" is perhaps the most hyped film of the year, and also the most undeserving of said hype. The story is a simple and predictable one. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is a consultant sent throughout the country to fire unsuspecting employees for bosses too cowardly to do the job themselves.
Up in the Air
Ryan is moreover having a delicious no-strings affair with another sexy exec with whom his flight-paths cross: Alex, played by Vera Farmiga, tells him she has the same uncomplicated needs as him ...
George Clooney and Vera Farmiga as High Fliers
Directed by Jason Reitman. Drama, Romance. R. 1h 49m. By Manohla Dargis. Dec. 3, 2009. For most people there's no joy in sucking down recycled oxygen while hurtling above the clouds. The free ...
'Up in the Air' Review: Movie (2009)
September 6, 2009 5:02pm. 'Up in the Air' Dale Robinette. TELLURIDE, Colo. — Cynicism and sentiment have melded magically in movies by some of the best American directors, from Preston Sturges ...
Up in the Air
Up in the Air fails because Reitman crams too many stories and situations into one picture. Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 12, 2019. Mattie Lucas The Dispatch (Lexington, NC) The film ...
Up in the Air Movie Review
age 15+. Not worth the effort. Not a feel-good movie. What a waste of time. A shallow film about a guy who realizes that his life is empty, but then does nothing to change it. Leaves you disappointed with the overall message that life is pointless, but it's not as bad when you have someone to share it with.
Up in the Air
Up in the Air Reviews. (Clooney and Farmiga) keep the wit and chemistry bouncing back and forth like a modern-day Tracy and Hepburn, if you can picture Hepburn sashaying across a hotel room ...
Up in the Air
Up in the Air - Metacritic. 2009. R. Paramount Pictures. 1 h 49 m. Summary Ryan Bingham is a corporate downsizing expert whose cherished life on the road is threatened just as he is on the cusp of reaching ten million frequent flyer miles and after he's met the frequent-traveler woman of his dreams. (Paramount Pictures)
Movie Review
Media no longer available. Up In The Air makes textured filmmaking look easy. It blends entertainment and insight, comedy and poignancy, even drama and reality, and never seems to break a sweat ...
The Movie Review: 'Up in the Air'
A fresh-faced B-school graduate, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), has come up with a plan to fire folks via video link, a move that would end Bingham's obsessive accretion of airline miles. When ...
Up in the Air
Movie Review. Ryan Bingham's occupation is to relieve people of theirs. He spends 322 days on the road, living out of a carry-on bag and firing employees for corporate honchos who are too gutless to do it themselves. ... And his solitary, Up in the Air existence is the only thing he loves. It's delightfully devoid of commitment, affection ...
UP IN THE AIR Review
Up in the Air is a great movie. The script is sharp, Jason Reitman's direction is astonishing, the cast is outstanding, and its story is as timely as its themes are timeless. The film is a strong ...
Up in the Air (2009 film)
Up in the Air is a 2009 American comedy-drama film directed by Jason Reitman.It was written by Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the 2001 novel Up in the Air by Walter Kirn.The story is centered on traveling corporate "downsizer" Ryan Bingham (George Clooney).Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, and Jason Bateman also star. Up in the Air was primarily filmed in St. Louis with additional scenes shot ...
Movie Review: Up in the Air (2009)
Stay Away Don't Bother Seen Better Not Bad See It. Don't be fooled by the trailers for Up in the Air. It may seem like a formulaic romantic comedy. It's not. Not by a long shot. Jason Reitman, following up his Juno breakthrough, has put together a finely developed and many times amusing story about choices — both personal and professional ...
Up In The Air Review
Up In The Air Review. Up In The Air is a well-crafted and very timely piece of cinema. A sure contender in the coming Awards Season. Up In The Air is a film whose entire point can be discerned from its title. This new offering from Juno director Jason Reitman stars George Clooney as a man whose existence involves traveling the country airport ...
UP IN THE AIR
UP IN THE AIR is an often funny but very dark cautionary tale with no hint of a solution to life's problems. Ryan Bingham is a corporate downsizer who fires people. He flies so much that he's almost reached 10 million miles. On the side, he lectures about getting rid of the excess stuff in your life, including people.
'Up In The Air'
While Ryan is content with travel on the road, he hears from his estranged sister, Kara, that his other, younger sister, Julie is getting married. Ryan left home when he first could leave and never looked back, and his family still remembers that. He is the 'black sheep' of the family, known to pursue his own gratification while letting his ...
Up in the Air
Up in the Air is one of the best films of 2009. It is directed by Jason Reitman whose genius for compelling storytelling and creative dramas has been revealed in Thank You for Smoking and Juno. Here he has written with Sheldon Turner a bright, snappy, and incredibly relevant screenplay based on a novel by Walter Kirn.
Up in the Air
December 02, 2009. A movie review by James Berardinelli. Up in the Air is a wonderful little film (the word "little" being relative, of course). It was the best thing I saw at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival, and it stand up as well away from the peculiar atmosphere of the festival as it did within the hermetically sealed environment.
Up In The Air Review
15. Original Title: Up In The Air. As the anecdote goes, George Clooney took just one brisk read of the script, sat in one of the many bedrooms of his palatial villa on the tranquil shores of Lake ...
Up in the Air (2009)
Natalie is unimpressed, and declares that if she had those miles, she'd show up at the airport, pick a place, and go. That evening, in bed, Ryan looks at his sister's wedding invitation. He receives text messages from Alex that quickly become sexually suggestive. He responds, smiles, and turns out the light.
'Civil War' Probably Isn't What You Expected It to Be
Lest that last bit seem like a spoiler, Civil War is the sort of movie in which hard-edged professionals grimly sit around prophesying their own fates.And although Lee's arc is predictable, the ...
Don't Believe What You Read About 'Liarmouth,' Says John Waters
I turned in the script. They like the script, but we don't have the money to make it," said Waters, who confirmed reports that Aubrey Plaza has been cast as compulsive kleptomaniac Marsha ...
'Challengers' Review: Luca Guadagnino Smashes the Sports-Movie Mold
By the end, "Challengers" has assumed the ball's POV — or maybe it's the racket's — as Guadagnino immerses audiences in the film's climactic match. Far from your typical sports ...
Movie
1 likes, 0 comments - thecinemagraphicAugust 23, 2023 on : "Movie - Up in the Air (2009) Review Date - 22 August 2023 This is a film that delves into themes of human connection, isolation, and per ...
'Franklin' review: Michael Douglas can't quite catch lightning as
Much like "Masters of the Air," "Franklin" marks the latest Apple TV+ historical series that feels like a companion to an earlier (and superior) HBO production - in this case, "John ...
'Civil War' review: Kirsten Dunst-starring thriller loads up on
The details of "Civil War" don't make much sense - it's hard to imagine California and Texas agreeing on much of anything, much less seceding together - but that's not really the ...
What Time Star Wars: The Bad Batch Season 3, Episode 12 Releases On
As has been the case for the prior 11 episodes, Star Wars: The Bad Batch season 3, episode 12 will be released on Disney+ at 12:00 AM PT, 03:00 AM ET, and 08:00 AM BST.This marks no change in The Bad Batch's air time, as the show maintains consistency with each episode.It is expected that these release times will continue for all Star Wars animated TV shows, including the newly-announced Tales ...

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