Mile-high morality

Column here. Despite its status as vapid mainstream "romantic comedy" fluff, Barbara Kay nonetheless is a good at pointing out key double-standards that remain part and parcel of "modern romance" found in a recent film. Excerpt:

Up in the Air is the Rom Com (romantic comedy) of the year. Most critics love it. It's hugely entertaining, but the surprise ending (spoiler alert!) sends a jarring message no reviewer (to my knowledge) has mentioned.

The film is based on Walter Kirn's eponymous 2001 novel about Ryan Bingham, a man who fires people for a living. Ryan spends most of his time on airplanes, traveling to mundane, mid-sized American cities, in each occupying a mundane office cubicle in which he fires mundane workers.
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On one of his downsizing forays, he hooks up with Chicago based Alex, a beautiful, sophisticated frequent-flying female version of himself. Their brisk, mutually straightforward seduction of each other suggests a long history of sexual grazing at the diverse human buffet frequent travel provides.
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Shortly afterward, succumbing to the neediness the trip home has inspired, Ryan impulsively flies to Chicago to see Alex and declare his feelings. Arriving unexpectedly at her door, he is shocked to hear the sound of children and a husband's voice. Alex's bourgeois family represents her real life, just as airports are Ryan's. He leaves before any damage is done, but she is furious with him for breaking the rules of their ... whatever it is, and for putting her happiness at risk. He meekly accepts her right to be angry. Back to his meaningless life he goes, sadder and not much wiser.

This is where the film lost its appeal for me. Ryan presented honestly as what he was, a single man looking for brief encounters. Alex presented herself as a single woman looking for same. But she wasn't. She was committed -- in her way -- to a family. Ryan wasn't cheating on anyone. She was.
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Ryan's crime, in Alex's eyes, was to allow emotion to col-our what was supposed to be a sex-only affair of convenience, the result of which was a near-intrusion into the real life Alex apparently holds sacred.

And yet: A mother of small children with a punishing travel schedule, Alex broke what surely has to be an equally important rule for one playing that game: the rule that says a frequent flyer's rare free time should be spent with one's nuclear family. She took a whole precious weekend -- precious for them, at least -- for an extended sexual fling, cementing the impression that she was single, and allowing Ryan's family to lavish warmth on her as a potential in-law to boot.
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In most comedies worthy of the name, even if guy doesn't get girl, some sense of social order and just desserts should prevail. Alex deserved exposure for her multiple duplicities, and Ryan deserved to feel he had been gratuitously humiliated.

Instead, the movie ends with Alex seizing and holding a false moral high ground, with Ryan accepting her judgment of him as a cad for succumbing to a yearning for intimacy. The would-be gentleman is alone and sad. The travel slut is happy and self-righteous. How Rom is that? How Com is that?'