What do we find Up in the Air? Vacuum.

Padre Roberto and I decided to head out to see (yet another) film this evening. I was a bit worried my presence was a distraction to him, but as he put it, “If I live alone I don’t get to see movies I want to see, because I don’t want to see them alone. With you here, I can go and see them!” Made sense to me.

We decided to see Up in the Air, the George Clooney film that people are talking about. It is about a guy whose job is to fire people — companies hire his firm to let people down easy (and in a way that covers their legal butts). He spends so much time on the road doing his job that he is barely ever home, a situation that he enjoys. He *likes* being in planes and airport lounges and hotel bars. Simply put, he is a travelling pro, who belives that the only way to be happy is to have no attachments to anything, not even people.

Of course, the vacuous nature of this rootless existence eventually catches up to him. His only goal in life is to acquire a particular level of frequent flyer miles, and he starts to wonder if this is enough. And he discovers it isn’t.

The end.

Well, there’s more. There are a number of funny (and sweet) moments that come from his interactions with a new employee in his firm who is young and perky and full of impractical ideas… he gets the job of showing her the ropes (to his dismay and hers). In some ways his rediscovery of idealism parallels her loss of hers. And there is his relationship with his family, which itself evolves.

But in the end, he is still left with nothing. The movie is about the deconstruction of an anti-hero. The possibility of some kind of redemption is held out at the end (quite literally, actually — he contemplates redeeming some travel points), but he does so with a lost look on his face. He starts out confident, he ends up lost. The end.

Quite depressing, if you ask me.

What is it about movies these days that they can’t have heroes? Maybe that’s why Avatar did so well. Not just the special effects, but the fact that the protagonist was himself changed and, in a way, redeemed. The nihilists were the *bad guys*.

At least Up in the Air faces the nihilism and shows us where it goes. I suppose that is valuable. And I’m sure there will be some who will say that it should be applauded as an aid to helping people become Nietzchean supermen, facing into the abyss. But personally, I think there is meaning to the world and to human existence. So I can’t celebrate tragedy, nor Up in the Air.

This post is dated Friday, January 29th, 2010 and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.