Jeremy’s Tophunder №70: Up in the Air

8 min readMay 14, 2020

What does it mean to be connected? What does it mean to be alone? What does it mean to have a full life? What does it mean to have something missing?

Up in the Air is set over the backdrop of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) who flies around the country firing people for a living. It was a rather darkly serendipitous coincidence that the movie was being filmed and produced during the 2008–2009 economic crisis, so the plot managed to resonate strongly at the time. The extras who are shown at the beginning and the end of the movie are people who actually lost their jobs during the recession — they were invited to participate in a “documentary” about job loss, and their interviews bookend the movie really nicely.

What drives the movie, however, is the differences between the three main characters, and how while they seem to disagree with each other, they actually all want the same things. They just approach them from different angles.

The movie sets up Clooney’s character to be an outsider. He -likes- to travel upwards of 300 days per year. He doesn’t keep in close touch with his family or friends (if he has any real friends), and he gives lectures on the benefits of having no material or interpersonal attachments. Meanwhile, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), sees an opportunity for innovation, allowing Clooney (and others like him) to fire people remotely, cutting down on travel costs and allowing those workers to be based in one central location. Natalie is the “normal” one. She’s dumbfounded that people would ever have to spend holidays away from their families because of travel, and works to eliminate that.

At first glance — Clooney’s character is a loner, disconnected from the world, and Kendrick, with her boyfriend and job that doesn’t require constant travel, is connected and fulfilled. But it’s not quite that simple. While Clooney seems to want to avoid any kind of personal connection if he can help it, he’s seemingly the only one who realizes that firing someone over a video-conference isn’t the right approach. Natalie, meanwhile, needles, and at times openly berates Clooney’s lifestyle, calling him impersonal and distant, all without a shred of irony while she pushes the company towards this new model of downsizing workforces that is, well, impersonal and distant.

Both Clooney and Kendrick think that they have the right mentality for how to live their life and how to execute their job, and they’re both equally right and both equally wrong. Over the course of the movie, it’s possible that each of them start to rub off on each other, but it’s unclear how much, if at all, it really changes them.

Between Clooney and Kendrick is Vera Farmiga’s character (Alex), who appears to be just like Clooney, but as we learn more about her over the course of the movie, we come to realize they aren’t as similar as we once thought. The big twist in the last half-hour of the movie is when we realize that Farmiga isn’t just the female Clooney, who travels around the country on business and has no “real” home — she does. She’s married and has kids in her “real” life, and her time spent with Clooney is an affair, not a budding romance. On the Clooney-Kendrick continuum, we start the movie thinking that Farmiga is on the end closest to Clooney. By the end of the movie, she’s still probably closer to Clooney than Kendrick, but she’s also probably closer to the middle than to either one of them.

This brings up my favorite question that the movie poses — what does it mean to have a full life? All three characters would tell you that they live a full and satisfying life, and all three of them would be lying. Clooney thinks he’s happy with his arrangement, but as he becomes closer to Farmiga, he realizes that yes, he has been missing something. Kendrick thinks she’s happy, but that’s only because she’s too young and stubborn to admit that (a) she’s in the wrong relationship, and (b) she’s on the wrong career path. Farmiga, meanwhile, would probably also say that she’s happy and satisfied with her life, but happy and satisfied people don’t have affairs with guys they meet at hotel bars. The last time Farmiga and Clooney talk, Farmiga says that their time together in random cities around the country is an escape from their real life, a parenthesis. People who are truly happy don’t need that kind of escape.

The themes of distance, loneliness, and fulfillment certainly resonated in 2009 in the throes of the financial crisis, but they might be just as resonant now in the middle of the COVID outbreak. All of a sudden, we have to be very intentional to think about our level of social connection. How do we stay in touch with people we can’t see in person? How do we maintain social energy when we’re discouraged from leaving our homes? It makes me wonder how these characters would have handled a period of quarantine. Would Clooney have been happy to be alone, or unhappy that he had to be alone in his sparse apartment in Omaha? It seems pretty obviously to me that Kendrick wouldn’t take it too well, but she would definitely be the person in her group of friends to organize a zoom happy hour once a week. As for Farmiga, how happy would she be with her family? Would she be happy to spend more time with them, given how often she normally travels for work, or would she get sick of them with that much face time?

I’m interested to know how much Clooney’s character actually learned and actually changed over the course of the movie. He starts off closed, but gradually opens up professionally (with Kendrick), romantically (with Farmiga), and personally (with his family). He’s able to come to the rescue at his sister’s wedding, and begins the process of transferring some of his precious frequent flier miles to an account in their name to allow them to travel for their honeymoon. He also extends a great unasked kindness to Kendrick, writing her a letter of recommendation for her new job. But I keep coming back to his relationship with Farmiga — he opens up and puts himself out there, only to have the door slammed in his face when he realizes Farmiga isn’t the person he thought she was. With regards to his personal life, it’s left rather ambiguous as the whether his mind has changed at all. Did this failure with Farmiga close him back off to the idea of a romantic relationship, or does he go forward with the knowledge that while she wasn’t the right partner, someone else might be? The movie doesn’t quite say.

It seems that Kendrick learned something from Clooney, at least. She quits her job (rather abruptly), and goes to San Francisco, where she takes the job that it seemed like she wanted to take after college, if not for her boyfriend. At the start of the movie, it was as if she was trying to fit a square peg (her Type A personality and professional and personal ambition) into a round hole (her life in Omaha). It just wasn’t working, but she never would have admitted that. Clooney, on the other hand, isn’t someone that tries to fit his personality into his life — he alters his life to suit his personality. Kendrick moving to San Francisco and switching careers is her first step towards being more like Clooney, or at least the parts of Clooney that were probably right all along.

While Up in the Air isn’t my favorite George Clooney movie, it’s probably his best performance. He’s received four Oscar nominations for acting (and four others for writing, directing, and producing), with this being one of them. He was also nominated for Syriana (which he won), Michael Clayton, and The Descendants. I’m particularly partial to Michael Clayton and The Descendants, both of which came close to being included on my list, but I think Clooney’s best work comes here. I really enjoy his back-and-forth banter with Anna Kendrick (who also probably submits her best performance yet), and he’s one of the few actors that can remain likable despite his vaguely abrasive worldview. Would I want to have a few drinks at a hotel bar with Ryan Bingham? I think so. Would I want to be close friends with him? I’m not sure that I would, or if such a thing would even be possible. But according to Jason Reitman, the role was written for Clooney, and if Clooney had passed, he would have offered it to Steve Martin, which I think says a lot. Whoever played the character had to have the air of knowing that they’re cooler than everyone else in the room. Clooney deflects it with magnanimity, while Martin leans into it for comedic effect. I might even like this movie more with Steve Martin, but Clooney is one of the few actors that could have pulled this off as well as he did.

A big part of the reason I like this movie is just because I like to travel. For those of you reading that know me well, that might sound like a surprise, so I want to make sure I’m clear. I’m not saying that I like vacations, I’m saying that I like traveling. I like airports. I like flying. It’s exciting to me. It’s the vacation part that I’m only kind of medium on. I don’t really care about exploring a new city or doing touristy stuff. When I’m on vacation, I’m probably doing the same things I’d do during a weekend in Boston — going to bars and spending time with friends. It’s more about who I’m traveling with and how we’re getting there than where I’m going. Up in the Air certainly romanticizes air travel and Ryan Bingham’s loyalty to American Airlines, and I just really enjoy those scenes. Adding that on top of the themes and questions the movie asks, it slides onto my list at №70.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11