Pink slips have a devastating effect, more so because it cuts people off from something to which they feel closely associated. In Up in the Air, Ryan (George Clooney) is a corporate downsizer who flies around the US firing senior employees of various companies, and conducts lectures on the virtues of ‘traveling with less baggage’. He claims to not believe in attachment or the institution of marriage.
Clooney moves in a man-of-the-world manner, speaks in a mesmeric tone, and has a certain magnetic charm about him that attracts the other sex. Vera Farmiga, as Clooney’s character’s ‘bed friend’, is a picture of elegance. Anna Kendrick, another hired firer, who believes she has it in her to even fire Clooney, brims with focus, determination, and overconfidence; and throws the words out of her mouth like sharp knives hurled at a target; but beneath her cold, steely demeanor hides a little girl who is very sensitive, emotional and naïve.
Ironically, an up-market version of folk artiste Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land plays over the opening images of the various places in America that the protagonist flies to, to fire people from their jobs. And during the end-credits, the voice of a previously unrecorded musician tells us that the end song was written and performed by him after he had lost his job.
Much as it is about layoffs, the story is also an examination of people and relationships, and the feeling of lightness that comes with being free. It also grandly philosophizes, through the voice of Clooney’s character, on the necessity to not be “weighed down by the heaviest components in one’s life, one’s friends and relatives with all their negotiations, arguments, secrets, and compromises”. The theory sounds fine, but honestly, for how long can one actually float in midair aimlessly? For, eventually, one is wont to get restless when the urge to be tied down—and this is one very strong urge—finally begins to set in.
Jason Reitman’s drama shakes people out of their comfort zone by bursting the seemingly-secure bubble that they had built for themselves. By doing so, it also allows them a chance from out of the blue to get out into the sun and do what they had really wanted to do in life before they got trapped sometime earlier in their professional lives. The film also warns of the risk of assuming that one is indispensible and of mistaking one’s company for one’s genetic family.
