Up in the Air is a good follow-up for Juno director Ivan Reitman: it’s like a grown-up version of that teen drama, playing with similar ambiguities and ambivalences.
It’s got an indie sensibility, translated to the major-star league as George Clooney takes the lead. And bravely, too, because his Ryan Bingham, a retrenchment specialist, is an unlikeable character. Would it have worked at all with a less personable actor?
Either way, Clooney gives his role enough of a double edge to make the film work as a character study, and turns in a fine performance. Bingham is a cool operator who values coolness above such entanglements as love, or even a cosy home; he’s a pleasure-seeker who also tots up his frequent-flyer miles in an anally retentive sort of way.
He thinks he values his freedom, but really he’s not into freedom: he’s a control freak. Complications enter his neat life in the form of two women: one is another cool operator who could beat him at his own game, the other is someone whose feelings may undermine her alleged ambitions, and thus unsettle Bingham’s rigorous cool.
That is his dilemma — and perhaps the filmmakers’ too. To redeem him or not? Is he redeemable? Up in the Air seems to want it both ways, or neither way, which is courageous, and it maintains a delicate balance of tonal options. But it does leave the viewer, like Bingham, rather suspended in space.