Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Overview… a young woman with big plans.Natalie barges into Career Transitions Corporation (CTC) with a hot-off-the-presses Cornell diploma and a folder full of ideas on how to optimize the company, which specializes in dismissing workers so that employers don’t have to. Natalie, however, doesn’t know the first thing about firing people. Ryan Bingham, a skeptic of her plans to replace in-person layoffs with videoconferences, quickly points this out. The owner of CTC, Craig Gregory, forces Ryan to take Natalie under his wing so that she can learn about the business. Thus emerges one of the most reluctant apprenticeships in corporate history.
Personality... ambitious, strait-laced, and sensitive. Natalie has lots of ideas for CTC, but lacks the charm and improvisational skills needed to succeed in getting them heard and implemented. Her rigid adherence to manuals and rules is often disadvantageous, as lay-offs rarely proceed in a set fashion. This, coupled with the fact that she gets emotional about disappointing others, probably means that Natalie should switch careers – a piece of advice that she would not take too kindly. But she does seem destined for success somewhere; the question is whether it will be at CTC.
Get to Know her in...
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George Clooney plays the dry cynical character of Ryan Bingham, an executive who specializes in "downsizing". Ryan lives out of his suitcase, traveling the country for the sole purpose terminating unwanted employees day after day. Just as Ryan is about to reach his life-long goal of the ten million mile frequent flyer mark some major changes come his way. Changes that threaten to crack the cold heartless exterior that is Ryan Bingham.
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Ryan Bingham’s job as a Career Transition Counselor–he fires people–has kept him airborne for years. Although he has come to despise his line of work, he has come to love the culture of what he calls “Airworld,” finding contentment within pressurized cabins, anonymous hotel rooms, and a wardrobe of wrinkle-free slacks. With a letter of resignation sitting on his boss’s desk, and the hope of a job with a mysterious consulting firm, Ryan Bingham is agonizingly close to his ultimate goal, his Holy Grail: one million frequent flier miles. But before he achieves this long-desired freedom, conditions begin to deteriorate.
With perception, wit, and wisdom, Up in the Air combines brilliant social observation with an acute sense of the psychic costs of our rootless existence, and confirms Walter Kirn as one of the most savvy chroniclers of American life.
