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One Georges Laphroig, an excellent fellow I’m sure, wrote to TellCliff recently to say that he disagreed with my positive take on the movie Up in the Air. “I found it soft,” he wrote. “Imagine, please, the same role played by the middle-aged Jack Nicholson, someone who takes positive pleasure in firing people. A mesmerizing bastard. Then you have a movie both intriguing and upsetting. A movie with edge that makes you question your own ethics as you watch. This was just feel-good disguised as angst-ridden.”

The other night, in the company of another fine chap — whose sensibility strikes me as being similar to Mr. Laphroig’s — I caught a showing of Five Easy Pieces (1970), directed by Bob Rafelson and starring Nicholson. Seeing it made me think about the parallels and differences between the two films, their main characters, and the eras in which they were made.

The first time I saw Five Easy Pieces, twenty-odd years ago, I didn’t take in the seemingly innocuous end credit “A BBS Production.” The B’s stand for Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, the S for Steve Blauner, three men who led a brief, glorious revolution in American film, who showed up as the fuddy-duddy studios were hemorrhaging money and saved the day by making movies that reflected what Americans were actually feeling. (See Peter Biskind’s entertaining, invaluable book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.) Given the era in which Pieces was made, you might expect the songs used in it to be rock anthems, but they are two Tammy Wynette numbers, “Stand By Your Man” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” And there, in a nutshell, you have the two warring elements at the heart of this movie: the traditions of society versus the strong impulses that lead us to run from them when they turn out to be hollow, impulses that don’t, however, necessarily take us to anything better. It’s 1970, and you’re Joe American. What do you do? Go to Vietnam and die for nothing? Join the Weathermen? Or just do whatever the hell you feel like at any given moment — since, clearly, nothing you do will come to any good anyway?

Nicholson plays Robert Dupea, who has left the upper-middle-class world of his upbringing — everyone in the family, including Robert, is a classically trained musician — to roam the country; he works on oil rigs and falls in with the trailer-park, bowling-on-Friday-night crowd, to which he can’t help feeling superior. He lives with Rayette (Karen Black), a dim-witted waitress; when Robert’s not with Rayette, he runs around with other women, and when he is, he isn’t particularly nice to her. Robert is, basically, a selfish bastard, one who cares only about his own pleasure, which he can never pin down for very long.

George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham from Up in the Air is a bastard, too — a professional one: he fires people for a living. If Robert Dupea runs from mainstream society, Ryan Bingham is fused to its core, working in an industry that adds a sinister twist to the cold soul of capitalism, exploiting not only the worker but the worker’s inevitable, built-in misfortune.

What is Ryan himself like? His ability to do his job suggests, at best, an emotional detachment, and in fact he tells us via voiceover that he’s happiest when he is — as he mostly is — in the impersonal atmosphere of a hotel or an airplane. Ryan doesn’t want (or doesn’t think he wants) to get married or form any other kind of emotional attachment. What he wants, mostly, is to reach a million frequent-flyer miles. It’s hard to say who’s the sadder case: Robert, who has no goal he can think of, or Ryan, who has one that makes him seem too shallow for words. In this way the two characters are perfect representations of their respective eras.

Each man rejects monogamy, until he meets a special woman, who in turn rejects him. This does not prove them to be good guys underneath; merely human. (I quote the Saul Bellow novel The Dean’s December, which I happen to be reading: “People in reduced emotional circumstances set their affections on something or other. . . . Total misanthropes, true, absolute ones, were probably as rare as saints.”) Each man makes a rare visit to his family and is nice to his sister. But here Robert, unlike Ryan, maintains his jerk-ness: his family feeling apparently doesn’t extend to his brother, whose lover he beds.

The Robert Dupeas were not to reign over American film for long. Sometime in the late 1970s, viewers decided (with a nudge from Star Wars) that they wanted to root for the good guys again, and they have ever since, if with an occasional look back. (The 2007 Oscar for best picture, after all, went to No Country for Old Men.) For better or worse, mostly worse, we are still very much in the era of the blockbuster and the “uplifting” film, despite a national mood that’s every bit as bleak as it was in 1970.

And no question, Up in the Air is more uplifting than Five Easy Pieces. Nicholson’s Robert is a bastard at the beginning of Pieces, and he’s a bastard at the end. The ending of Air is ambiguous, but there is a glimmer of hope that Clooney’s Ryan is making a change. I would stop short, though, of calling Up in the Air a feel-good movie. Forrest Gump is a feel-good movie; its message is, So what if you’re not the smartest, hardest-working, best-informed guy in the room. You’re a good person. And that’s what counts, right? The elegantly written, well-acted Up in the Air is, by contrast, a do-good movie. We can do good, it seems to say — or at least stop doing bad — if we choose to. We can reject the evil around us, unless, of course, we accept the premise of the masterful Five Easy Pieces, which is that the evil is us: Run all you want, you won’t get away from yourself, you dog, you. Which of these messages is closer to the truth? That is not a rhetorical question.