Editor's Note: Be mindful that this review contains spoilers.
It is one of life’s greatest frustrations that resolutions are drawn out over time rather than delivered in moments of sudden realization. Only in the most contained situations – in theatres and in stadiums – do we get to live out our dreams of dramatic endings and absolute results. I walked into Up in the Air expecting such an ideal world of clear-cut cause and effect and in a sense it did not disappoint. However, even if the entire film hinges on one moment that occurs 93 minutes in, and it builds up as expected towards this climax, it does not provide the anticipated escapism in its aftermath.
We do not expect romantic comedies to deal with the quotidian and mundane aspects of life. In fact, we expect them to skip over these things, or at least to reduce them all into a quick montage. But Up in the Air, while in the guise of a romantic comedy, is ultimately a film about our day to day frustrations. Rather than fuel our heightened expectations of life, it presents a story precisely about what happens when these are left unfulfilled and we still have to get up the next morning.
The film’s main character, Ryan Bingham, fires people for a living. He spends most of his year travelling through the United States, handing out farewells and compensation packages on behalf of bosses who cannot bear to do it themselves. What seems like a nightmare for most people is ideal for Ryan, who thrives off air travel, hotels, and the sparse living and loneliness that comes with them. He keeps his possessions to a minimum, cuts all unnecessary ties to fellow humans, and frequently runs self-help seminars to convince people to take up his lifestyle. A monk for the modern world, Ryan begins Up in the Air thinking himself the happiest man alive, and the rest of the plot is ostensibly a journey toward realizing how wrong he is.
Ryan’s world is turned upside down by the appearance of two women, Natalie Keener and Alex Goran. The former is a precocious up and comer who sets about revolutionizing Ryan’s company. She proposes that they begin to fire people over webcam, rendering useless the 322 travel days a year that Ryan cherishes. While Natalie threatens Ryan by putting his nomadic lifestyle at risk, Alex causes problems precisely by affirming it. Ryan and Alex meet in a hotel bar, spend the night together, and then compare travel schedules to see when they will be in the same city again. The similarities are not stated subtly: “think of me as yourself, only with a vagina,” Alex tells Ryan.
The way the relationship between the three is supposed to evolve is obvious from the beginning: Alex helps Ryan realize how boring his life is. Natalie’s youthful optimism then convinces Ryan to date and ultimately marry Alex, thus proving that even the most lost human beings have a soul mate waiting for them somewhere. Meanwhile, Natalie begins a fruitful career by restructuring Ryan’s company, which coincidentally allows him to spend time at home with his new family. Maybe Natalie finds her own soul mate as well.
This plot structure is familiar to anyone who has seen a romantic comedy. In these films, everyone deserves and receives the same fate, the same form of happiness based on putting human relationships over everything else. Every romantic comedy will teach you two basic life lessons: that nothing is more important than love, and that once you realize this fact you won’t have trouble finding it. Ryan, who disdains all human relations and preaches about the necessity of complete self-sufficiency, is thus the perfect candidate for romantic comedy conversion, and Up in the Air seemingly sets up the pieces for a traditional outcome. The film builds to its climactic moment, but then, instead of witnessing a heartfelt ending, we find out that Alex is married with kids and wants nothing from Ryan except for hotel sex.
The fact that the pieces fall so differently than expected is not merely a whim on the part of the writers. A trick is played on the audience, but only if we are willing to stereotypically fill in the blanks of Alex’s life, which we are mostly kept in the dark about. We do not know what her job is, why she travels so much, or anything about her life at home. We see her through Ryan and Natalie’s eyes, and we imagine that she must be falling for Ryan like he falls for her. It is assumed that Ryan is the only one of the two who needs to change and that Alex is only waiting for him to do so. When we discover the awful truth we are only stripped of our unfounded expectations. Instead of moving us further into the magic world of film, Up in the Air’s climax jolts us, and Ryan, back into reality. Alex reminds us that life is not a movie, and that we were naïve to ever believe it could be.
Yet even when the film takes this unexpected turn it does not surrender to unadulterated pessimism. The film ends with two contradictory scenes. First, a montage of employees who have just been fired, all speaking about their families and the hope they provide. Then right after we find Ryan staring at the departure chart in an airport, perhaps about to follow Natalie’s advice to use his air miles and “pick a place and go,” or perhaps merely preparing for another business trip. In either case he ends by accepting his nomadic lifestyle again. If one emphasizes the first scene, the film sticks to the romantic comedy message: love and companionship remain the be-all-end-alls of life, and Ryan becomes a tragic case of what happens when we don’t find either. But this is not necessarily the correct reading. Which of the characters shown at the end is the audience meant to relate to: the unemployed men and women who at least have their family to go home to, or the prosperous but lonely Ryan?
If we stick to the first reading, Up in the Air ultimately blames Ryan for realizing too late that his life is dreary and meaningless. The rest of the film, though, tries hard to create sympathy for Ryan. Beyond the fact that the ultra-charming George Clooney does his best to bring out the likeable aspects of the character, Ryan himself does his part by performing the requisite romantic-comedy heroic act: when he realizes that Alex is the way out of his lonely existence he spontaneously travels to Chicago to see her, thus setting up the disappointing climactic moment. By all rules of genre and Hollywood justice – where recognizing the problem is the first step, and then proving it in an over-the-top manner is the final one – Ryan deserves a happy ending. The audience is meant to relate to, or at least sympathize with Ryan throughout the movie, and this is no less true at the end. However at that point of the film, doing so requires swallowing a message far different than what appeared to be coming. Instead of finding out that dreams do come true, we are told that most of the time things don’t change, and that if we do attempt to radically change things we will receive blank stares and rejection.
Up in the Air’s ending is not just an attempt to fuck with the audience, nor a misguided attempt at artistry, precisely because Ryan’s character is treated sympathetically. Like in all good romantic comedies, Ryan is the lost character who gets found and this makes the anti-climax distressing; when Ryan gets rejected, the audience (or maybe just me) is enraged at Alex. The movie itself, though, rightly does not pass judgment on her, because what would be truly reckless is for her to leave her husband and kids for Ryan. “What do you want?” she asks Ryan after her real life is revealed. When he does not respond she continues, “You don’t even know what you want.” But Ryan does know; the problem is that he also knows that he cannot ask for it. So instead of selfishly demanding that Alex start a new life with him he goes back to work, back to circling the globe and living in hotels. In the final scene, even if he can fly for free to any destination he sees on the departure board, Ryan remains trapped in the life he created for himself.
This is what is ultimately so remarkable about the film, and so different from what should have happened if it followed the romantic comedy structure: from beginning to end, almost nothing changes. One could argue that all the characters come to know themselves better, but empirically, in terms of their lives, they end up where they started off: same jobs, same friends (or lack thereof), same lives.
The only character that does change is Natalie, and her case is quite indicative. She begins the film having chosen love over her career and Omaha over the big city lights. By the end, though, she has been dumped and accepted a job offer in San Francisco. Her end result is yet another distortion of romantic comedy expectations. Natalie moves for a boy, as she says – she chooses intimacy over the long-distance, love over all rationality – and for her efforts is rewarded, like Ryan, with heartbreak. Yet unlike Ryan, Natalie is young enough to change. The job she takes in San Francisco is the one she could have taken right after graduating had it not been for her decision to move with her boyfriend. After being the great idealist of the film, she leaves Omaha and it is as if the whole affair never happened.
Natalie’s change is precisely what assures that everything else in Up in the Air remains unaltered. It is also the change that takes place in the viewer, who moves from grandiose expectations for all the characters to a realization that the final outcome is the only realistic one. In both cases the film does all it can to disprove the romantic comedy ideal, and by all accounts it succeeds. None of the characters ends up happy in the ideal sense (Alex especially has problems if she describes her affair with Ryan as “an escape”). Instead, they go through life on the unremarkable paths marked and treaded for them. The film makes clear that these rarely lead to the highest peaks of joy and happiness, but it does not suggest that the characters will be miserable. A hope remains for them, as for the unemployed people at the end of the film, to be content in spite of the fact that things have not worked out as expected. The two final scenes of the film ultimately show the similarities between the film’s characters, all of whom, in the face of unfulfilled expectations, still have to move on with their lives.
In the end, Up in the Air does not outright deny the romantic comedy message – as Ryan says to his brother-in-law, “life’s better with company” – but it does not pretend like any of it will come easily, according to plan, or to everyone who wants it. It does not even claim it is necessary for all to have, since Ryan ends up alone but seemingly satisfied. It leaves us with no expectations, and no suggestions either.
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that in contrast to stories like Cinderella or Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” where the main characters see great changes in their lives, Hamlet is a play where nothing changes. One never really finds out whether the ghost is actually Hamlet’s father, whether Claudius is the murderer, or if Hamlet himself will be punished in the afterlife for any of his actions; the events of the play are for the most part inconclusive as to what they mean. Vonnegut claims that this makes Hamlet truer to life than other stories because it recognizes a simple truth: that “we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”
Up in the Air upsets us because it disrupts our sense of what should be good and bad news. There is no sudden upward shift in fortune for any of the characters, and furthermore the film is littered with people who mean well and get nothing but hardship in return. But it is silly to expect magnificent change in our lives, or grand and just consequences from our actions. Life is not a movie, and it is naïve to think it ever will be. At most it meanders along, offering hints to what the next move should be, but never conclusive answers, and certainly not ribbon-tied resolutions.
In a year when dramas, not comedies, provided the best escapism for viewers – be it to other world in Avatar or other time periods in Inglorious Basterds – Up in the Air offers a striking dose of realism. It pulls the rug out from under the characters and the audience. It tempts both with an offer of great escape, only to reveal that there is none to be found. In doing so, though, it provides a twisted kind of hope and comfort for worried times. Perhaps once we stop trying to escape from our lives, we’ll actually start enjoying them.
