I was at the Telluride Film Festival back in September, when Up in the Air had its premiere there (as often happens, the film had its first public screening at Telluride, shortly before its “official” premiere at Toronto). I didn’t see it then, but the people I knew who did were very enthusiastic, speaking not at all about its relationship to director Jason Reitman’s previous hit film, Juno, but all about the film as a statement on the economic crisis that was affecting so many Americans at that time, as it continues to do.

Telluride is a funny town. Located in a staggeringly beautiful area of mountainous Colorado, today a great part of the land around it is owned by Ralph Lauren; houses in Telluride sell for millions of dollars. A lot of young people live there, mostly college graduates who’ve come in from elsewhere to work for a year or so. One of the people I stayed with, who lived in a nice, big house with a group of twentysomethings, was working as a labourer during the days, and spent a lot of time hiking, cooking very healthy food and reading books about environmentalism and financial catastrophe; it was from him that I first heard the enthusiastic word about Up in the Air and its incisive view on the contemporary economic climate.

Seeing Up in the Air now, we can see what exactly it has to say or to show us about the economic depression and massive job losses in the United States – and it’s not too impressive. This supposedly biting satire follows Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) as he performs his job of flying from state to state, firing unwanted employees for companies that hire him to do their dirty work. The ultimate anti-hero, Ryan perversely loves his job and the jet-setting, responsibility and commitment-free lifestyle that goes with it. Skating along on Clooney’s movie star charm and Reitman’s fast, bouncy, numbing editing (a “boom-bada-boom pace,” as J. Hoberman wrote), the film doesn’t let us forget that, beneath this surface glitter, SOMETHING BAD is going on. And so, at certain carefully positioned points in the narrative, we get glimpses of some of the real victims, those who pay the true cost for the breezy lifestyle of Ryan and his kind: the people he fires.

These people are presented as sublime, Christ-like victims, in front-on close-ups, as they respond with anger, confusion and dismay to what Ryan tells them. Their unmistakable role is to stand as personifications of the national trauma that the financial crisis brought about; and so, flitting from one victim to another, or pausing for a long leer at one in particular before moving on, Reitman seems convinced he is showing us the truth of this situation, its true toll in human misery.

Why does this attempt ring so false? Largely because the film is incapable of showing these people as anything other than the representation of a collective trauma, a constituted problem, a thematic concern, a kind of sublime object of liberal bourgeois guilt. This then takes me back to those people at Telluride who so admired the film, and leaves me feeling that Up in the Air’s actual ‘position’ is that of one sector of the educated middle-class regarding and condemning another: the audience is led to identify with the benevolent, caring liberal gaze (something Telluride’s audiences would have little trouble doing), and the work of the narrative is to have Ryan shift gradually towards this same position, away from that of the bad, complacent, status-obsessed late-capitalist, represented here in its purest form by his boss (Jason Bateman).

The people he fires along the way are each steps on Ryan’s journey of maturation, which includes a casual-affair-that-starts-to-get-serious with another highflyer, Alex (Vera Farmiga), a sparring relationship with a young colleague (Anna Kendrick), and a trip to his sister’s wedding in his small-town Wisconsin home. For a film that supposedly takes a hard look at the catastrophe of contemporary American life, Up in the Air’s rendering of the victims of this catastrophe as object lessons in how-George-Clooney-got-his-soul-back just doesn’t seem good enough.

[Conall Cash is co-editor of Screen Machine. He has studied in the arts and humanities at universities in the United States, Australia and France, and also writes about film at Catabloguing.]