Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
12/27/09
'Tis the season for angst:
between the Christmas season that's never quite as happy as holiday specials
promise and the New Year holiday that demands we take stock of all in our
lives that's lacking or in need of change, the end of the year always feels
like a crossroads. Throw in a down economy and the daily drumbeat
of environmental and political doomsday scenarios to which we're exposed,
and there couldn't be a more perfect (or worse, depending upon your point
of view) time for Up in the Air, Jason Reitman's angsty new dramedy.
Powered by a sensational George Clooney star turn, Air asks big
questions about our eternal search for happiness, and, appropriately, comes
up with precious few answers. Fitting snuggly between Reitman's previous
two films, the brilliant, underrated Thank You For Smoking and the
clever but overrated Juno, Up in the Air is
the perfect movie for a world where, more and more, uncertainty is our
co-pilot.
Ryan Bingham (George Clooney)
fires people for a living. More to the point, he delivers the bad
news to people who've been fired by employers too gutless to do the job
themselves. As such, he's always on the road: 322 days last
year, in fact. He's perfected travel to the point where he considers
the air his home, and he's got a plan to become just the seventh man to
collect 10,000,000 frequent flier miles. He even discovers a relationship
of sorts when a chance meeting with fellow prestige-junkie Alex Goran (Vera
Farmiga) leads to traded text messages and occasional hotel hookups during
their shared travels. But his refined life of public isolation is
about to come to an end: his boss Craig (Jason Bateman) has embraced
a plan drawn up by recent college grad Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) to
do all the firing via webcams, eliminating the need to travel at all.
Ryan is enraged: not only will this take him away from his beloved
life
of frequent flying, but also strip his job of all the meaning he's given
it, as he genuinely believes his interpersonal skills make the firings
tolerable for people at their most vulnerable. Craig is moved
by his arguments only to a point, and Ryan and Natalie are sent out on
the road so he can teach her the subtleties of the termination game, the
better for her to write a flowchart of catchphrases she believes will allow
anyone to be a “terminator”. On the road, he tries to pass along
his traveling and firing wisdom, while she convinces him to consider taking
things to the next level with Alex. He does so, inviting her as his
“plus-one” to the wedding of Ryan's rarely-seen sister Julie (Melanie Lynskey).
It's as if the universe was pointing the veteran loner toward a new life
of connection to the people around him... except sometimes that's not as
easy as it might seem.
I expect that Up in the
Air will divide audiences as to what they think it's actually saying,
but here's my take. There is no greater meaning to our lives but
that which we provide, and so we need to find something we can at least
believe makes us happy. The problem is, while we're all raised to
believe that love, family, and job satisfaction are those keys to happiness,
very few people can actually make them work, leaving the rest of us in
a constant state somewhere between desperation and isolation. We
can try to find meaning in other people, but they can easily shatter it
by leaving or betraying us. We can try to find meaning in employment,
but unemployment or reassignment are always just one bad executive decision
away. No one in Up in the Air ends up happy, but all of them
are clinging to some kind of hope that happiness is right around the corner.
And the older you get, the lower you move the bar. It is, truth be
told, just as easy to read the movie as an embrace of marriage and family,
but given how everything works out, Ryan can't really see those things
as anything but carrots being dangled from a stick that remains tantalizingly
out of his reach. He built a comfortable life setting people adrift
from their jobs, and events conspire to leave him with the same sense of
“what am I gonna do now?” they all felt. His routine, the connection
he felt to businesses always happy to thank him for his “loyalty” as a
customer, cannot survive contact with a world of people whose own self-interest
makes them fundamentally disloyal even as we desperately wish it were otherwise.
Reitman specializes in getting
great performances from his stars, and here he's got our premiere old-school
movie star in Clooney doing what he does best: undercutting his charm
and good looks with isolation and vulnerability. This is a big-time
Star Turn, and he makes every look, every line count. Even when Ryan
isn't the focus of a shot, he's always oozing charm, warmth or anxiety
wherever he is in its' margins. Farmiga, the underrated heart of
The
Departed, matches his charismatic glow as the woman who seems to be
made for him, if only she truly were as cheerfully superficial as he.
Kendrick gets the job done as the girl who's in over her head trying to
reduce human matters to business decisions, although the story mostly loses
interest in her as it goes. Bateman makes a great odious boss, only
Ryan's pal as long as he toes the line. Lynskey, Amy Morton and Danny
McBride do a good job fleshing out the family members who couldn't have
less in common with Ryan.
If there's one thing about
Up
in the Air I take issue with, it's Reitman's decision, apart from a
couple of star turn cameos (a funny Zack Galifianakis and a poignant J.K.
Simmons), to use real-life firing victims “playing” themselves as the victims
of Ryan and Natalie's handiwork. The non-actors clearly don't fit
in the middle of such a slickly-mounted enterprise, and it comes off feeling
condescending to suggest that the movie “gets what they're going through”,
particularly in a closing-minutes montage of people talking about how they
drew strength from their families in their time of crisis. Pity Ryan
has no such hope for human connection since, you know, the script wouldn't
allow it. Far more successful is the end credits-closing musical
number ostensibly sent in by a fired musician hoping “maybe you can use
it in your movie”.
It's a minor quibble in an
otherwise excellent film with an unusual level of insight into what it
means to be disconnected in a word of relentless faux connections.
Reitman knows how to get the most out of his casts, and also has a good
eye for unique settings for his stories, and his third film is no exception
on either count. Up in the Air might just give you more reason
to be depressed this holiday season, but it'll also give you plenty of
food for thought. Get those resolutions ready. |
