Eye Candy #375 - "Up in the Air"

Up in the Air:  I thought going in that I wasn’t going to enjoy this film.  Wasn’t really in the mood for a drama, but I was pleasantly surprised.  A movie about people with no attachments, who find themselves attached.  George Clooney is Ryan Bingham, a corporate down-sizer hired by companies to let employees go, who is very much in the same vein as other standard Clooney “types“ - confident, smooth, and a little smug.  He spends over 320 days on the road each year, flying here, there, and everywhere.  He’s more comfortable in hotel bars and first class seating.  One night in a hotel bar, he meets Alex (Vera Farmiga), a fellow denizen of the airlines, and they begin a casual/un-casual relationship as their paths crisscross the country for work.  With changes occurring at his home office, he takes a young up-and-comer on the road to show her the ropes of what he does (Anna Kendrick, as Natalie Keener), so that she can see how he operates out in the field as the owner of Bingham’s company (Jason Bateman) gears up to slash travel budgets, pinning the jet-friendly Bingham to the ground in Omaha, doing his job via impersonal video conferences and weblinks.  A very timely movie in this economic climate, and also very appropriate for the fairly cynical world we live in, where the sort of “classical” views of adult relationships seem to be deconstructed down to man‘s need for companionship.  The cast is uniformly good (Farmiga has never been more attractive), with real downsized employees portraying their film counterparts.  It’s got humor, it’s got sadness, it‘s a human story functioning in an essentially inhuman lifestyle.  Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”