Movie Review: Up in the air

LITTLE ROCK — Gently devastating, Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air is a movie of great grace and modest aspirations that plays as dry comedy but resounds with tragic gravity.

It’s a movie about what’s important in life, if anything. Ryan Bingham (an impeccably cast George Clooney) values his light-footed lifestyle. A corporate hitman who specializes in downsizing long-term employees for trigger-shy managers, Ryan is proficient but not cruel. While he reserves some empathy for his targets, he doesn’t offer false hope. He provides a service; he’s simply better at delivering the bad news than the milquetoast bosses who hide in their offices at the moment of truth. He is quick and disciplined - in and out. In bad times, his business booms.

Ryan even follows the code of the hired killer: He’s acquired nothing he can’t walk away from. While he has a small apartment near the home office in Omaha, Neb., he spends most nights in anonymously efficient hotel rooms. He eats in blandly expensive chain restaurants and always orders to the limits of his per diem - to maximize his reward points. He haunts antiseptic boarding lounges and airport bars, hoarding frequent flier miles and reward points and exulting in the heightened levels of care and attention his status commands.

His life seems perfected when he meets his near-equal, fellow road warrior Alex (Vera Farmiga) who is suitably impressed by Ryan’s credentials. Soon they’re arranging their schedules to rendezvous in airport hotels all over the country. They are a new kind of adult American, constantly moving, colliding briefly as they pinball across the country, making love and having dinner and conducting themselves as a couple whenever their calendars allow, shooting each other affectionate text messages when they diverge.

But then Ryan’s lifestyle is threatened by a young usurper, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who thinks it’s even more effective to fire workers over the Internet. You could even provide the “terminators” with a flowchart script to follow, which would make old pros like Ryan superfluous. At the very least, he’d be grounded, reduced to talking to the discharged via a voice-over Internet protocol.

Yet Natalie is callow, and so she’s sent out on the road with Ryan by their boss (Justin Bateman) to learn the ropes, and to gain some valuable experience delivering bad news face to face.

There is an undeniable sense of the moment in Up in the Air, which is heightened by the filmmakers’ use of recently fired non actors as some of the people Ryan and Natalie are required to lay off (others are played by recognizable actors like J.K. Simmons and Zach Galifianakis). And though it’s never articulated, Ryan seems determined to grant his victims a full measure of dignity, to the extent that he seems to stand in weird solidarity with them against the faceless forces that deprive them of their meaning. (It’s also interesting how Natalie’s enthusiasm for her work seems to humanize her - despite the obvious human toll her monstrous new methods will extract.)

All the principal performances are excellent, and Clooney’s wised-up slyness and confidence have rarely been put to better use. But the sleeper star here is Farmiga, whose Alex has layers you might miss on the first viewing. Like the movie she inhabits, she’s likely to surprise you.