‘The plane movie I’ll watch anytime’: why Up in the Air is my feelgood movie

Airports have always been my happy place. From shiny citadels jutting out of the desert to shoddier European hubs located 120 miles outside the city they’re designated to serve; I love them all. With so many stories to be told, all those connections and people colliding, it’s a first-class seat to life itself. Which should go some way to explaining why I hold such a deep admiration for 2009’s comedy-drama Up in the Air.

Directed by Jason Reitman and based on the book of the same name by Walter Kirn, it stars an Oscar-nominated George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a US corporate downsizer who spends 322 days a year flying state to state doing the job cowardly employers prefer to outsource, leaving him with “43 miserable days at home”. That is until graduate Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) enters the firm with a cost-saving idea of firing people by video call, and hits the road with her older colleague, who is suddenly forced to grapple with the future of his own industry while re-evaluating his nomadic lifestyle.

Clooney’s hatchet man is closing in on 10m frequent flier miles – a feat he gleefully reveals has been achieved by fewer people than have set foot on the moon – and has managed to get air travel down to an exact science: flexing his airline Concierge Key like Patrick Bateman might a business card, and rolling his (perfectly sized) suitcase through the minefield of departures with panache, this is a traveller who stacks security trays with conviction. It’s infectious to watch, truly.

In my early 20s (around the time of the film’s release) I would often travel to far-flung places on somebody else’s dime, preferring lonely barstools, a buzzy career and fleeting relationships abroad over any real adult responsibility that lay back home in London’s tricky rental market. Though I was two decades younger than its central character, Up in the Air connected with me in such a way that I would watch the movie near religiously during those trips, screening it on any device possible for that extra hit of wanderlust. It remains the plane movie I’ll watch anytime, anywhere; or listen to, for that matter …

What keeps me coming back to this movie isn’t some inner desire to travel – it’s the heart. For all his commitment issues, Bingham is pretty empathetic when he’s on the clock. Fortune 500’s answer to Freddy Krueger at least does his best to connect with the staffers he’s letting go, cutting the bullshit when necessary and reminding Kendrick’s eager bee that in this line of work they’re meeting people on the worst day of their lives. Firing people from thousands of miles away, he tells her, is morally wrong on every level (this from a guy she accuses of living in “a cocoon of self-banishment”, no less) but most of all it lacks a real duty of care – and as we hurtle ever closer towards workplaces being ruled by big AI, I find this message more prescient than ever.

Another plotline that yanks at the heartstrings is Bingham’s romance with a similarly well-travelled businesswoman, played by Vera Farmiga. Kindred spirits? Not quite. Late in the movie, he makes a surprise dash to her home only to realise that their love story has been about as transactional as room service when he sees signs of a husband and kids through the door frame. Clooney’s wide-eyed expression as he backs away into the snowy Chicago night never fails to floor me.

And there is a happy ending – just not for the reasons you might think. By far the biggest masterstroke of this movie is Reitman’s decision to cast real people who had recently been fired, instructing them to talk to the camera crew as they would their ex-employer, providing an unfiltered snapshot of the casualties on the frontline of a recession. The director found these talking heads by pretending to cast for a documentary – and it really shows, feeling part-HBO doc and part-episode of NBC’s The Office as real faces (and tears) are intermingled alongside stellar performances from the likes of JK Simmons and Zach Galifianakis, as employees who bite the dust.

Throughout the runtime these genuine voices turn from collective anger to dumbfoundment and even optimism, reminding us just how unbreakable the human spirit can be. In fact, by the movie’s finale you’ll find it so uplifting that you may have the urge to put a tray table up.

• Up in the Air is available on Kanopy or Hoopla, to rent digitally in the US, on YouTube, to rent digitally in the UK and to rent digitally in Australia