A.O. Scott in yesterday’s NT Times with a fantastic analysis, comparing Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), the Protagonist in the new movie Up in the Air, to Jerry Maguire (Jerry Maguire) and even George Bailey (It’s s Wonderful Life):

Up in the air you may meet Ryan Bingham, an ancient mariner of sorts who has, over the years (at least in Walter Kirn’s novel, where he originated) encountered just about everyone who has flown business class across the spokes and hubs of this great land. Ryan is capitalism with a handsome face: efficient, optimistic, confident without undue arrogance. He’s a winner, and he belongs to a winners’ club that anyone with sufficient grit or good fortune can join. You’ve met some of the other club members, and when you run into the new, gray-haired George Clooney version of Ryan in Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air” you may find yourself wondering: Does he know Jerry Maguire?

Remember Jerry Maguire? I don’t mean the memorable catchphrases — “You had me at hello,” “You complete me,” “Show me the money” — though there is something to be said for a movie about business that crystallizes its themes so effortlessly in aphorisms. I’m thinking of the man himself, perfectly embodied by Tom Cruise at a point in his career close enough to “Risky Business” and “Top Gun” that some of his bratty winner’s vigor was still intact, but far enough from Oprah’s couch that the energy was not yet off-putting. In 1996 Jerry was a person very much of his moment: post-Cold War, pre-9/11, mid-boom. He was also, for his moment, the incarnation of a venerable American ideal.

Here’s where Scott’s analysis is instructive per screenwriting. Track his take on the process of Jerry Maguire’s transformation [my emphasis in bold]:

Not the mythical self-made man — surely Jerry had risen from the comfortable middle of the socioeconomic heap — but rather a man in the process of unmaking and remaking himself. In the course of Cameron Crowe’s movie, the professional, personal and romantic aspects of Jerry’s life are all dismantled and put back together again, sometimes by accident, sometimes by his agency, leaving him more or less where he started and yet at the same time completely transformed. He starts out in the grip of a vision, suddenly gifted with the ability to see everything wrong with his field (he’s an agent representing professional athletes) and able to put his insights into prose. The result is a manifesto, a mission statement that earns him the apparent admiration of his colleagues and costs him his job.

What makes “Jerry Maguire” so engrossing, so full of surprises even on repeat viewings, is the odd, syncopated rhythm of triumph and loss that animates Jerry’s story. He chooses to take his humiliation as vindication, and sets off to start his own company with a single client (Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Rod Tidwell) and a lone employee (Renée Zellweger’s Dorothy Boyd), who in due course becomes his wife. And so, before the movie has reached its midway point, he has it all. But of course he has it all wrong. The outward trappings of fulfillment are not yet matched by his inner condition, and so he must undergo further realignment, to become a better friend, a better husband, a better agent and a better man.

If Jerry’s ambition seems for a while to undermine his ability to sustain his connections with his wife and best friend, that is not because of any inherently destabilizing imbalance between love and work. It is because he has not yet learned to harmonize those things.

The way he learns is through adversity, a habit that makes him a walking illustration not only of management-philosophy boilerplate, but also of the doctrine of the fortunate fall, whereby sin is understood as beneficial because it makes redemption possible. “Jerry Maguire” is a success story made up of episodes of failure. It works like a charm, and partakes of a very old magic. Surely Jerry is, in his way, a descendant of George Bailey from “It’s a Wonderful Life,” who has to fail and falter so many times on his way to a Christmas apotheosis. Love and work, civic duty, family responsibility and selfish ambition have to pull him apart in every direction before he can pull himself together into the person he was always meant to be: solid citizen and husband, doting father and prosperous businessman. George’s repeated losses make that triumph sweeter and, in the durable logic of this kind of fairy tale, all the more real.

If you’ve read anything I written on this blog about character archetypes and the Protagonist transformation arc, you’ll recognize much of it in Scott’s articulation here: The opening state of the Protagonist, a disconnect between how they’re living their life in the External World versus the authentic aspect of their ‘self’ that exists in a repressed / suppressed form in their Internal World – a state I call Disunity; the call to go on their transformation journey — experiencing Deconstruction and Reconstruction (in Act Two), which knocks down their belief systems and modes of behavior they had developed and relied upon in their life before FADE IN, thereby allowing the core essence / authentic self to emerge and reconstitute who they are into a ‘new’ persona — ultimately ending up in a Unity state ala the requisite “realignment” Scott talks about above.

In a way, the circumstances of the story, the Plotline, each of the primary characters and their respective subplots, all of that exists to service the Protagonist’s transformation. Which is why I ask my students, “Why does this story have to happen to your Protagonist right now? Why here? Why now?”

The outward trappings of fulfillment are not yet matched by his inner condition, and so he must undergo further realignment, to become a better friend, a better husband, a better agent and a better man.

That is the language of a screenwriter, standing ‘above’ their story, peering down at the Protagonist and understanding what must happen in the course of the Protagonist’s transformation. And in a movie like Jerry Maguire, everything that does occur, all those major and even minor plot points, each of the major characters – from the Attractor Dorothy Boyd (Renee Zellweger) to the Trickster Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) to Mentor Ray Boyd (Jonathan Lipnicki) to Nemesis Bob Sugar (Jay Mohr) and the Shadow of what Jerry starts out thinking success means – everything in the story is tied directly to Jerry’s transformation.

[Standard caveat: Not all stories have a Protagonist transformation. However a majority of mainstream movies do.]

Jerry Maguire is a wonderful movie, written and directed by Cameron Crowe, and very much in the spirit of Billy Wilder, a mature, smart, and human piece of entertainment. Having read the script (co-written by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner) for Up in the Air over the weekend, I can’t wait to see the movie. As Scott notes, it offers a variation on a similar theme to Jerry Maguire and even It’s a Wonderful Life — and that theme revolves around the Protagonist’s transformation, one of the most endearing and powerful story archetypes in human culture.