Up in the Air

Here's a film that – despite the solitary isolation of its main character – is all about human relationships and intimacy. No, really.

Even though Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) spends most of his time zipping across America in American Airlines jets, expenses paid, this is a film that finally emphasises the need for human contact. Bingham's life is obsessed with jumping queues and staying in Hilton rooms paid for by his boss (not for nothing does his love interest (Vera Farmiga's Alex) say that they are two people 'turned on by elite status'. It's a pretty soulless life, a fact almost mourned by the film's final shots – taken in flight – when the music underscoring Clooney's final monologue cuts out as he finishes. We are left with just the distant hum of the jet engines and the clouds, rolling away endlessly below. It's an empty, empty world.

Even in the opening credit sequence, Up in the Air manages to present America as an ugly, soulless place – using snapshot after snapshot of uniform, bland cities and open, uninteresting fields to show Clooney's vast national travelling. He's a man working his way up to the landmark ten million air miles, so naturally there's a lot of flying involved.

His job? He fires people for a living, working in one of the few industries whose workers clap their hands with glee at the first sign of a financial crisis. The global recession is their payday. Company directors that have been forced to downsize hire men like Clooney's Bingham to lay off the workforce they themselves daren't face. Again and again, as he fires another hapless worker, Bingham is asked how he can sleep at night, what should the newly-unemployed tell the people at home that rely on their pay cheque? Bingham is a smooth operator, well-rehearsed in dodging such questions and avoiding all forms of human connection with these people. Instead, he hands them a load of paperwork to help them fulfil their dreams and live up to their true potential, a way of looking at their redundancy as a positive, life-enhancing experience.

But for all Bingham's 'philosophy' of cutting lose from interpersonal connections and being a lone individual, life just keeps forcing relationships onto him. From his sister's upcoming wedding to the rookie (Natalie – Anna Kendrick) assigned to shadow him at work (in planes and offices around America) and learn the ropes, through to the woman he hooks up with when their flying schedules allow, Bingham just can't get away from human relationships. It's perhaps ironic that his dream – that air miles milestone – involves as a prize a meeting and conversation with the human face of American Airlines, chief pilot Maynard Finch (Sam Elliott). But where it really hits him hard is when he's the one asked to talk to his sister's intended (Danny McBride), who gets cold feet on the day of the wedding. Suddenly, he has to argue in favour of relationships and family and children – all of which he argues against in his motivational speeches for the touring speakers' circuit.

Crucially, the comedy lies in the personal touches. Natalie's scene or so of personal revelation after being dumped by text, for example – ironic, as she's the one keen to introduce to Bingham's company firing by videophone, thus removing what he values as a personal touch (again, a life with little interpersonal interaction) – or the easy, early flirting between Bingham and Alex.

But what Clooney's boyishly charming Bingham finally realises – and should have known all along – is that he actually quite wants to settle and that maybe, for some people at least, companionship is no bad thing. Therein lies the heart of the matter.