Word: ryans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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That's quite a feat in Up in the Air, since his character, Ryan Bingham, is a management consultant hired by other companies to tell their employees they're no longer employed. He's a fire-man; he keeps his job by relieving other people of theirs. And he does so with such ostensible sympathy and sincerity, with helpful suggestions on other lines of work, that the victims often leave the interview not wanting to give Ryan the Death Touch. He's a head chopper acting like a grief counselor...
...fires people, released at a time when at least a tenth of the workforce is out of work, is utterly nervy. And wonderful. Up in the Air is not primarily an issue movie, banging home its thesis with reductive characters and heavy melodrama. It's a romantic comedy, as Ryan finds a soul mate - if either of them has a soul - in the sultry Alex (Vera Farmiga), another high-flying executive with an itch for sex in Marriott hotels and airplane commodes. As she tells him, "Think of me as yourself, only with a vagina." It's the perfect relationship...
...That's Ryan's life, and he loves it. "Last year I spent 322 days on the road," he says. "Which means I spent 43 miserable days at home." He's not so much a frequent flyer as an occasional lander. On one flight, when a pilot sits next to him to chat and asks, "Where do you live?" he replies, "Here." Ryan is a citizen of Airworld, as he explains it in the Walter Kirn novel on which the movie is loosely based. "Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood and even...
...Natalie (Anna Kendrick) has her way. Fresh out of business school, with a psychology minor, she sells the company president (Jason Bateman) a scheme to save millions of dollars in air and hotel bills: just fire people from the home office, over a picture-phone device like iChat. Ryan is stricken. Natalie's plan threatens not his job - he can stay in Omaha, Neb., and make the kill calls - but his way of life. No more first-class treatment; no familiar salutations from hotel clerks and flight attendants who are his equivalent of friends; no more great sex with Alex...
...traces of a mass grave authored by the region’s secret police, the townspeople quickly and mechanically rebury the remains. “The Skating Rink,” with its project still so modest, can only be that reburial.—Staff writer Ryan J. Meehan can be reached at rmeehan@fas.harvard.edu...