Billed as one of George Clooney’s finest cinematic performances, this movie portrays the life of the ultimate corporate jetsetter. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, whose job it is to travel around the country firing people. His company is hired by other corporations to do their dirty work of informing staff that they no longer have a position in the company they have been working for, sometimes for many years. As Bingham explains it, “we get people at their most vulnerable and then set them adrift”.

Bingham’s life is one in which he finds himself contented – without the responsibilities of marriage and other relationships, yet also without a home. For Bingham, home is in the first class seats and VIP lounges of 747s and major airports across America. His job has no soul, family connections are a distraction, and his major goal in life is to reach 10 million frequent flyer miles. While not blind to the superficiality of the way he is treated by airport staff everywhere he travels – he is fully aware that whenever his name appears before the staff behind the counter, they are trained to give him the same warm welcome and smile, word for word, each time – he enjoys the lifestyle of the corporate businessman who knows he has a job to do and does it well.

As life goes on though, and he hooks up with a seeming soul mate who has the same dreams in life as him – escape from relationships and retreat into the safety of casual fun – a distant light begins to burn slowly brighter that causes him to consider that, just maybe, this isn’t all he really wants out of life. Two of the catalysts to this slow realisation are, firstly, when Bingham’s upstart young colleague, who has been traveling the skies with him, hits a raw nerve by calling him a 12 year old boy, and secondly when he is later, in a seemingly innocuous manner, described as “just someone who is lost”. Along with this confronting feedback are the issues of how to deal with his evolving feelings for his newfound partner in fun, the distraction of the upcoming nuptials of his sister, and his boss’s threat to Bingham’s jetsetting lifestyle by having him and all his colleagues grounded to save costs in this time of global financial crisis. Amidst all of this, Bingham starts to think that the life of all fun and no intimacy is not all it is cracked up to be.

This film highlighted to me the inseparability of the complexity of human emotions from the most detached of lifestyles. There is no such thing as a purely mechanical relationship. In fact, the latter term is an oxymoron. A vast ocean of emotions are always just below the surface, seemingly stifled in their cry out to be heard shouting the truth under the suffocating blanket of superficial affairs and an emotionally disconnected lifestyle. Nowhere in the movie is this more poignant as when Bingham is floored with a bombshell by his female friend, just as he is reaching out for true connection. The pain on his face at that moment reveals the shattered state of his soul within.

C.S. Lewis once said that

“to love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

If the great writer was still with us today, he might have said that this quote was the perfect descriptor of Ryan Bingham’s life – one which is truly ‘up in the air’.

This movie reveals, in both a serious and lighthearted way, issues of life, love, relationships, and meaning, and does so in a way that is both appealing and thought-provoking. It is for these reasons that Up in The Air impacted me like no other movie in recent times. Strongly recommended.

by Nils von Kalm

http://soulthoughts.com