Up In The Air

With a synopsis that runs along the lines of 'George Clooney is a loner with a thankless job who finds a new love and perhaps finds the happiness that has eluded him for so long', you'd think this isn't the film for me. The trouble is though that I think Clooney is a very good actor, up there with the best in the last decade, so I always check out his new stuff.

As soon as I finished watching 'Up in the Air' I was annoyed. Annoyed because the film seemed to portray a picture of life and work in which being made redundant is an opportunity for growth and where living life outside of the mainstream is a disease to be cured, in addition to the expected trauma. You see, Clooney plays a guy who flies around America firing people who have bosses too shit scared to fire people themselves. His job is to avoid a scene, to dress redundancy up as a chance for new life, an opportunity to shake out the cobwebs and start again. He spends over 300 days a year on the road and has the sole goal in life of amassing 10 million air miles. After a chance encounter in a hotel leads to a one night stand with a similarly over-travelled business woman, Clooney's new work partner (a very young, sparky and intensely irritating graduate type) slowly convinces him that what he really wanted all his life was to settle down. It's winding me up to even recall this bit of the plot.

This is basically it, and after 80 minutes of I was getting pretty tired. Thankfully the film doesn't end quite as twee as you'd expect, there are a couple of twists and turns that result in a very different message coming out at the end. It took me a good 24 hours and a discussion with a friend to decide this, but in the end I recon 'Up in the Air' has a positive message about following your dreams. I wont give away the ending too much, but by the final credits most of the characters have ended up following a path that they had always wanted to, but never did because of thinking they wanted something else. This links in with the concept of sacking people being a good thing. Although I think dressing redundancy up as an opportunity is managerial bollocks to make the process easier for employers, the idea of willingly living your life in a dead-end job because you either can't be bothered to leave or feel you have a responsibility to stay has some merit.

So, 'Up in the Air' gets a tentative thumb-up from me. Eventually.