Monday, January 11, 2010

Movie Quote of the Day (George Clooney, on Loyalty)


"There's nothing cheap about loyalty.”—Ryan Bingham (played by George Clooney), in Up in the Air, written by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn, directed by Jason Reitman

Nearly 40 years ago, pop sociologist Vance Packard’s A Nation of Strangers examined the negative consequences of a mobile American workforce, prominent among them being destroyed communities, eroded family life, and individual alienation.

Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, which I saw yesterday, takes stock of an America that, having ignored Packard’s prescient warnings, finds itself not only in the midst of an economic emergency but also a prolonged dark night of the soul. The surprise here is that the latter belongs mostly to the film’s main character, Clooney’s Bingham, a consultant who flies all across the country to do the firing that company heads are too cowardly (and incompetent) to perform themselves.

The bulk of the movie is taken up with a question fired at Bingham in one of the early sequences by a terminated employee: “Who the f--- are you, anyway?” All smooth charm, Bingham, like America, has embraced rootlessness as a form of freedom.

His life’s treasures are not measured in blood (burn family albums, he glibly tells audiences) but in plastic (e.g., frequent-flyer miles he’s amassed). The form of commitment he knows best is brand loyalty—what a weightless corporate America owes fickle consumers, the magic elements that allow him to breeze through airlines, hotels, and car-rental agencies—not what companies owe longtime employees nor what family members owe each other.

“How much does your life weigh?” Bingham asks audiences in his well-paid motivational speeches. Eventually, two women—a fellow business traveler who could practically be his spiritual twin and maybe his soulmate, and a young college grad with a plan to make his jet-setting work a thing of the past—compel him to confront his life choices. Does weight provide an anchor after all? Bingham asks.

Clooney (in the accompanying post with co-star Vera Farmiga) does some of his finest, most subtle work in this film, as Terrence Rafferty noted perceptively in yesterday’s New York Times. Yet one hopes that the Oscar gods will also take note of writer-director Jason Reitman. He has grown in confidence and sophistication with each of his films to date (Thank You for Smoking and Juno before this).

Reitman had this project on his plate since 2002, but only got to it now. The years have only deepened what could have been merely a by-the-numbers romantic comedy into an unsentimental, surprisingly searching dramedy about American values. He does not hold his audience cheaply.

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