Getting a lesson in leaving your life behind.

Up in the Air
USA | 2009 | Dir. Jason Reitman
George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick

It only seems fitting that I am sitting in the Salt Lake City airport while writing this review.  I am a nervous flyer and normally dread visits to the airport. Up in the Air somehow managed to take all of the United 93 out of flying and instead instill the airport with an veneer of peacefulness and escape. While there were humorous scenes, particularly the one in which Ryan Bingham (Clooney) schools his fresh-out-of-college protégé about picking the right security line, the film settles into a moralizing zone common to Reitman’s other films. Thank You For Smoking and Juno both find the humanity and best in awkward and uncomfortable situations, Big Tobacco lobbying and teen pregnancy respectively. This film tackles issues just as difficult, job loss in the recession and isolation, in a way that is more profound than the other two and less tongue-in-cheek “cute”.

In addition to sterling acting by all three leads, the heart of the film can be found sprinkled throughout: interviews with real, non-actors who had been recently fired and were given a chance to say on camera what they wished they had the moment they were being let go.