Alaska Employment Law

Up in the Air, released in 2009 for Oscar® consideration, stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a man who works for a company that businesses hire when they want to terminate the employment of workers being fired or laid off, but lack the gumption to do the job themselves.  It’s also a romantic comedy, an uneasy filmic juxtaposition when the current U.S. recession is easing except for that part about the number of jobs not increasing.  Bingham fires people, who look very unhappy.  He also takes an occasional lover as he jets back and forth across America, and he meets his match when he finds road warrior Alex Goran (played by Vera Farmiga) in a hotel lounge.

As our story unfolds, Bingham’s company has decided to curtail sharply the enormous air and hotel expenses that it incurs flying its terminators around the country, and to do the job by remote video connection.  The brains behind this ghastly idea reside in the head of recently hired 24-year-old Natalie Keener (played by Anna Kendrick), a Cornell graduate who wears her hair in a severe ponytail and has her entire life all figured out.  Bingham (who secretly wants to join American Airlines’ Ten Million Mile Club) objects, arguing that the human element is an integral part of what he does. 

Bingham persuades his boss to let him take Natalie on their latest tour of employee reductions, a tour marked by both humor and grimness.  In their travels they meet Alex (by prearrangement of Ryan and Alex), and the three of them become friends, sort of, when Natalie’s boyfriend dumps her via text message.  Events conspire to bring Ryan closer to his estranged family in Wisconsin.  He begins to reconsider his utter lack of commitment to the world, and he acts decisively to connect.  Things happen, the plot accelerates, and the soundtrack fills with dreary mope-rock songs.

This film won’t (and shouldn’t) win any Oscars®, but Clooney is, typically, impossible not to like, Farmiga is perfect, and Anna Kendrick is a total surprise.  A day or two before I saw this film, Anna Kendrick appeared on Letterman in the shortest micro-miniskirt a human being can possibly wear, and her performance on the show suggested a slightly daft, star struck teenager.  Maybe she is those things, but in this film she’s darn good.  Up in the Air is a pleasant diversion, not more.  (In fairness, my wife liked it more than I did.  And she is not especially a George Clooney fan.)