Reitman fails to ground himself in reality

Up in the Air ignores any statutes of limitation on making fun of the American economy and goes straight for the jugular — finding veins of comedy and drama within the plight of the American worker.

With a director like Jason Reitman at the helm, Up in the Air is hardly typical as satire, and, as the director has shown with his previous two films, he finds much more pleasure in studying the conflicted personality of an antihero rather than anything resembling a typical protagonist.

That antihero is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a worn-down corporate axman who wanders from city to city performing layoffs. Ryan faces several crises. His comfortable lifestyle of living in airports and collecting frequent flyer miles is placed in jeopardy when a young co-worker suggests all firing be done over the phone. At the same time, he meets a woman just as detached from humanity as he is and finds himself falling for her.

While Reitman gave himself over to Diablo Cody’s vision for Juno, Up in the Air plays much closer to Thank You For Smoking, his first produced screenplay. Ryan is classically Reitman, a figure who is likeable despite his job and worldview ­— he gives darkly hilarious motivational speeches about the importance of jettisoning all personal connections — and entering his heavily-narrated, well-ordered world carries with it the same joy as Thank You For Smoking.

For all his looks and charm — and liberal sensibilities — Clooney plays the best conservative, white collar everyman in the business. His Ryan comes off like Michael Clayton with a dark sense of humor. Clooney is witty enough in the role, but his sheer likeability as a star gets in the way of Reitman’s essay about a man we are supposed to hate.

Opposite Clooney are two women: Anna Kendrick as his go-getter trainee Natalie and Vera Farmiga as Alex, the love interest. Clooney graciously hands every single scene to Kendrick, who just about walks away with the movie. She perfectly embodies a slightly older version of the obnoxiously overachieving student everybody knew in high school, and some of the film’s best comedy comes from stripping her control away and watching her spin out.

Up in the Air reaches for something far deeper than in anything Reitman has helmed before, but the director is not quite up to task as a storyteller to give his story the kind of emotional gravitas it so clearly yearns for.

Reitman, who has a background in improv and sketch comedy, is better at writing individual characters and scenes than fitting them all together into a cohesive narrative, and the film builds toward some shattering emotional moments that either come out of left field or seem unearned by the film’s lighter tone.

Up in the Air is really two films, both a play on the title. The first is the comedy about Ryan’s gradual and Frank Capra-esque realization that finding a real home might be preferable to his solitary life on the road. The second film is a tragic portrayal of the American economy, focusing on the uncertainty and malaise the average worker faces in the face of men like Ryan.

More than any of the twists and turns Ryan’s life takes, the heart and soul of Up in the Air comes from this story within the narrative. Ryan and Natalie fire a lot of people over the course of the film, and Reitman made the brilliant decision of casting recently fired non-actors out of Detroit and Saint Louis to play variations on themselves.

The film’s release is therefore perfectly timed, and a scene where Natalie is forced to fire a sobbing man through a computer screen might be the single most emotionally resonant moment in any American film this year.

By focusing this second narrative around the humanization of a modern American villain like Ryan, Reitman lends comedy to the tragedy and tragedy to the comedy. The resulting tone is a bizarre yin and yang of comedy and drama that seems far less forced than the personal and professional quandaries — set to slightly more downbeat indie music — that Aaron Eckhart’s Nick Naylor faced in the more tonally-deficient Thank You For Smoking.

Up in the Air is funny — probably the director’s funniest movie — and has a heart, but it is not quite the show of maturity that Reitman clearly hoped it would be. Taking the American economy on was a bold and brilliant strategy, and it pays off some huge dividends, but Reitman needs to find a focus at a more basic level before his films can attain the kind of strong core that he is searching for.