This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Of every film that came out this year, I didn’t see a single one more assured, more confident, more utterly comfortable in its own skin than Up in the Air. I didn’t see one with characters who inhabited roles that felt more convincingly lived in, or a story more apropos to life as you and I live it. From the moment it lifts off to the moment it touches down, “Up in the Air” positively soars.

It’s easy to admire Ryan Bingham (George Clooney)—to be in awe of him even—without wanting to be him. Ryan, who works as a cooperate downsizer, has a routine that is simply breathtaking. The ultimate business traveler, Ryan lives his life in an air/hotel/rental car trifecta. Those things about airports you and I hate, he finds reassuring and familiar. They are home and he has home down to a science. Everything he needs can be stored easily in a wheel-away carry-on luggage case. He belongs to every elite club imaginable and is on the cusp of getting 10 million frequent flyer miles, an almost unprecedented feat. When Ryan speaks at seminars designed to uncomplicate and streamline one’s life, he points out just how much emotional baggage we all carry around because of our attachments to other people. He does so with the understanding that we will remedy the problem by severing those ties. For Ryan, life is meant to be lived in perpetual motion. That way you’re never sitting still long enough to make a connection.

Of course, this perfect plan is foiled when he meets Alex (Vera Farmiga), a female version of himself (the implications of which he fails to fully grasp). They share the same philosophy and speak the same lingo. Theirs is the perfect, simpatico relationship: dalliances penciled in across the nation without the emotional strings that make what they share a real relationship. Just about the time Ryan begins to wonder if his lifestyle has gotten in the way of his happiness, his boss (Jason Bateman) assigns him an assistant (Anna Kendrick), a young Turk whose ideas about how to revolutionize their company may ground Ryan permanently.

The endearing and deeply pleasurable Up in the Air marks director Jason Reitman’s (Thank You For Smoking, Juno) third time behind the camera and his second withering dissection of corporate America. The film, which is sure to pick up a very deserved Best Picture Oscar nomination, understands both the road and the workplace deep within its cinematic bones. Reitman’s perfectly balanced, clean aesthetic positively sparkles. The script, adapted from Walter Kirn’s novel, bites one moment and inspires uproarious laughter the next.

The cast is superb, effortless and graceful. Clooney, who gets more urbane and debonair with each role, is matched perfectly with Farmiga, an actress who can balance tender warmth and aloof frigidity with just a hairsbreadth’s of space separating them. Kendrick, best known for a supporting role in the Twilight films, bulldozes her way into grown-up films, all cockiness and bombast, masking a vulnerability perfectly understandable given her youth.

There is more than a little Fight Club here, the idea that modernity has hoodwinked us all into elevating the worthless at the expense of the precious. The film recognizes that growing a heart can be painful and ugly. Though a film about companionship, Up in the Air looks at things through the lens of loss and includes at least one moment that comes as a gut punch, murdering the taste of laughter still fresh in your mouth. Quiet and contemplative, Up in the Air is not a remotely complicated film. In fact it can all be summed up in a simple phrase: life is better with company. But don’t think that that epiphany comes cheap. What is simple is not always easy, and ambiguity, while not as satisfying as a Disney denouement, is still blissfully open-ended. Only a cynic like Ryan Bingham would see undefined vagaries as hopeless.

© Copyright 2009 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.