I encourage you to go see Clooney play Ryan Bingham an airport warrior, Termination Facilitator, job transition specialist who fires people for a living and whose major life goal is to reach 10 million miles in the air. When corporations need to downsize quickly, he flies in and breaks the news to the new former employees. His job is the most secure when business is the most insecure.

Scriptwriter and director Reitman made the risky choice, while shooting in Detroit and St. Louis, of using real, fired people to play themselves giving them a shot at saying and doing what they wished they had done if they weren’t in such total shock when they went through this clinical, dehumanizing firing process. The movie is based on the book with the same title written by Walter Kirn in 2001. At that time Kirn told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, “I … wanted to create a character who’s comfortable with all the things that the intelligentsia in America is not comfortable with, the vast and oppressive consumer culture.” Reitman appears to have gone well beyond the book’s more simple message with subtle, penetrating characters and an underlying message America most needs.

During the six years it took Reitman to make his gem, he made his own significant life transition getting married, having a child and maturing as a person. When one of his characters says, “life is better with company,” we can sense it comes from the heart. “This is the most personal film I’ve ever made,” Reitman has said, and what that means is that Up in the Air has been constructed with an underlying warmth and concern about character and an accompanying understanding of what’s of value in life, of what it means to be human in all senses of the word.

Terry Gross interviewed Reitman this month which gives insights into Reitman, Clooney and making movies.

Of all the movie reviews I’ve read two stand out for me. Frank Rich best penetrates the importance of this movie and our economic crisis which will envelope our lives for some time to come. George Will shows atypical sensitivity and normal insensitivity in the same review.

FRANK RICH: What gives our Great Recession its particular darkness — and gives this film its haunting afterlife — is the disconnect between the corporate culture that is dictating the firing and the rest of us. In the shorthand of the day, it’s the dichotomy between Wall Street and Main Street, though that oversimplifies the divide. This disconnect isn’t just about the huge gap in income between the financial sector and the rest of America. Nor is it just about the inequities of a government bailout that rescued the irresponsible bankers who helped crash the economy while shortchanging the innocent victims of their reckless gambles. What “Up in the Air” captures is less didactic. It makes palpable the cultural and even physical chasm that opened up between the two Americas for years before the financial collapse.

The private-equity deal makers who bought and sold once-solid companies like trading cards, saddling them with debt, never saw the workers whose jobs were shredded by their cunning games of financial looting. The geniuses in Washington and on Wall Street who invented junk mortgages and then bundled and sold them as securities didn’t live in the same neighborhoods as the mortgagees, small investors and retirees left holding the bag once the housing bubble burst.

Those at the top are separated from the consequences of their actions. They are exemplified by Robert Rubin, formerly of Citigroup and a mentor to both Obama’s Treasury secretary and chief economic adviser. He looked the other way when his bank made ruinous high-risk bets, and then cashed out and split, leaving taxpayers to pay for the wreckage while he escaped any accountability. Such economic wise men peer down at the country from a hermetically sealed bubble of privilege and self-interest, much as Ryan does from the plane flying him to his next mass firing. And they tend to think, as Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs notoriously put it, that they are doing “God’s work” to sustain our free-market system.

Last week Goldman Sachs announced it would grant some of this year’s bonuses in stock, not cash, to try to stanch the public backlash to the record profits it piled up thanks to government largess. But Washington remains strangely oblivious to the mood out there. Financial reform has been embattled on Capitol Hill, where the financial industry has spent $344 million on lobbying in the first three quarters of 2009. The big ratings agencies that gave triple-A stamps of approval to Wall Street’s junk are back to business as usual. Bank of America and Citi are racing to return TARP money to Washington not because they have necessarily recovered but because they want to shower rewards on their executives with impunity.

The rage engendered by this status quo is across the political map. As unlikely as it sounds, Ron Paul and Jim DeMint, political heroes of the tea party right, and Bernie Sanders and Alan Grayson, similarly revered on the left, have found a common cause in vilifying the Federal Reserve Bank and its chairman, Ben Bernanke. The Fed is hardly the root of all evil, but you can see why it is a handy scapegoat. Like the institutions it failed to police during the boom, it wields its power from on high with little transparency to those below.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/opinion/13rich.html?ref=opinion Frank Rich

GEORGE WILL: The movie begins and ends with everyday people talking to the camera, making remarkably sensitive statements about the trauma of being declared dispensable. Some, however, recall that the consequences included being reminded that things they retained, such as their human connections, are truly indispensable.

America has an aging population and has chosen to have a welfare state that siphons increasing amounts of wealth from the economy to give to the elderly. Having willed this end, America must will the means to it — sometimes severe economic efficiency to generate revenue to finance the entitlement culture. So “Up in the Air” is sobering entertainment for a nation contemplating a giant addition to the entitlement menu. In addition to being perhaps the best American movie of 2009, “Up in the Air” is two mature themes subtly braided and nuanced for grown-ups. One is the sometimes shattering sense of failure, desperation and worthlessness that overwhelms middle-aged people who lose their livelihoods. The other is that such shocks can be reminders that there is more to life than livelihoods.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/18/AR2009121802150.html

In my post last Sunday on Hag’s blog, Corporate Cancer: An insidious disease that is consuming America and the world, I wrote about a common enemy that both left and right, middle and poor America could rally around. Those on the left chose that end of the spectrum because they recognize that those on the right are scared, frighteningly alone souls vainly searching for meaning in life. This brilliant movie shows why that choice is so wise and important to America’s soul which seems to be lost in the corporate cloud that surrounds all our lives.

We can eventually find the sun and our version of a meaningful life only if we find a way to bridge our ideological gap and attack a common enemy, Corporate Communism. Corporate Communist leaders are their own worst enemies and the most lost and sad despite their trumpeting of the “good life.” They need our help the most and are unlikely to ever realize it.

Hopefully, future historians will look at them as Flat Earthers whose stupidity knew no bounds and who nearly wiped out humanity. If not, there will be no future historians to write such a history.