Why do we love to see Clooney play smooth talkers who create a shell of cool detachment around them (Michael Clayton, the Ocean’s movies, heck even Fantastic Mr. Fox)? Give him a speech in which he takes a scalpel to the heart of our sentimentality and Clooney is at his finest. He gets just such a speech in Up in the Air. When he’s not jetting from company to company firing people as a consultant, Ryan Bingham has a nice little sideline in motivational speaking. His standard spiel is about “unpacking our backpacks”; he imagines all the things that weigh us down, like possessions, friends, family, emotional connections. Ryan, of course, has eschewed all that in favour of the life of a Zen road warrior chalking up frequent-flier miles. It’s terrific fun watching him rupture the naïveté of Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a young up-and-comer at work whose efficiency-minded proposals threaten his happy existence in the skies.

 

You probably sense a “but” coming up, and indeed Up in the Air can’t avoid the inevitable punishment that awaits anyone in American culture who does not embrace family and love and marriage and all that crap. The pleasant surprise is that the screenplay (by Reitman and Sheldon Turner’s screenplay from a novel by Walter Kirn) makes its concessions to sentiment so half-heartedly. One of the joys of Up in the Air is the no-strings relationship between Ryan and another frequent flier (Vera Farmiga) who seems equally detached – it’s like watching beautiful sharks mate. Reitman’s eye for satire is as sharp as it was in Thank You for Smoking, and our only regret is that the movie makes any concessions at all to the conventions of Hollywood. Bring on the sharks.