Arizona Reporter - Movie Reviews - 02/12
UP IN THE AIR
Paramount Pictures
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: A-
Directed by: Jason Reitman
Written By: Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner, from Walter Kim’s novel
Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, Danny McBride, Melanie Lynskey
Screened at: DGA, NYC, 11/27/09
Opens: December 4, 2009
Everyone knows the expression, “Hey, I’m only the messenger!” That seems not to appease a great number of people, though. Think of Oren Moverman’s film “The Messenger,” in which Col. Stuart Dorsett and Sgt. Will Montgomery have the unenviable task of visiting the families of soldiers who have died in action, the first to break the news to the survivors. Some of the family members cry outright, some are stoical. One fellow, Dale Martin, spits on the officers: “Why wasn’t that you?” thinking that they had cushy administrative jobs—never mind that one was a medal-receiving hero in battle. In “Up in the Air,” the victims are the people getting the bad news rather than their families. They’re still alive, still kicking, but they’re past their prime. Once Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), the messenger in Jason Reitman’s movie tells the executives from various companies around the country that they no longer have positions, some cry, most ask rhetorically how they’ve supposed to continuing feeding their families, one threatens suicide. They’re a sad lot: director Reitman does not try to evoke humor from the succession of interviewees, though he has ample laughs throughout the film and one, jaw-dropping twist that saves the story from traces of gooey sentimentalism.
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In one of his best roles, George Clooney—known for the most part as a handsome, wiseass character such as Danny Ocean in Steven Soderbergh’s “Ocean’s 11”—is in his métier and then some. With a witty script co-written by the director and Sheldon Turner from Walter Kim’s novel (available at Amazon.com for under eight bucks including a Kindle edition), “Up in the Air” focuses on Ryan’s make-up which is simple enough, except for the fact that there is something he values more than love, family, and money: that’s logging free frequent traveler miles but their own sake as though trying only to make the Guinness Book of World Records. And why not? The company he works for under the management of Craig Gregory (Jason Batman) pays for the tickets, the rental cards and the motel rooms. All of this makes the man happy enough, until he is pulled back by circumstances like an owner who suddenly jerks the leash of his Doberman. He meets another traveler, Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), a free spirit who needs no elaborate seduction ritual to find a place that rents rooms or a place in his heart. All takes place within a radical change in firing methods devised by a mousy young hotshot, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), who proposes firing people over the Internet to save Craig’s company 85% of its expenses.
Photographer Eric Steelberg takes his lenses to Omaha, Miami, San Francisco, and wherever Ryan goes to accumulate miles throughout the U.S. while at the same time stopping a number of middle-aged workers in their tracks. In a brilliant satiric thrust at technology and a rejoinder to all who believe we’re better off footloose and fancy free rather than “stuck” in a marriage with a family, “Up in the Air” explores the character of its messenger, a guy who is far less welcome wherever he goes than are a tax auditor or a relative unknown woman who shows up on the doorstep with news that she’s pregnant. He gives motivational speeches, actually the same one in every city urging employees to simplify their lives by putting everything in a backpack—for which he is a role model, traveling with only a carry-on bag and the thought of returning to an
antiseptic room in Omaha.
The chemistry between Clooney and Vera Farmiga has to be seen to be believed as they perform in the roles of two people who schedule themselves to meet in hotel rooms whenever they get the urge and have the time—an affair not unlikely to the world of a handsome, cultivated, traveling salesman, except that Clooney’s character is shaken by a discovery of what appears to be His First Love. Anna Kendrick in the role of a naive woman in her mid-twenties, the kind that can be found on city streets listening to their iPods or texting on iPhones, gets a send-up when similar technology is used to break her heart and cause her to have, what, an early-age crisis?
As one of the so-called prestige films coming out during the months of November and December when adults can finally, safely go to the multiplex, “Up in the Air” is fly, blending humor and heartbreak in a wholly authentic, stick-in-the-gut way.
UP IN THE AIR (Paramount Pictures)
Rated R. 109 minutes. © 2009 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
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