"Up in the Air"
(2010, Jason Bateman, USA)
Average Contributor Rating:

In light of the recent economic recession claiming jobs and livelihoods all over the world, Up in the Air treads a dangerous line. Play too much to the comedy side of things or present job losses in a too unrealistic light, it runs the risk of trivialising the effects of the recession and making tragedies seem silly and inconsequential. Swing too much to the other side, however, and Up in the Air becomes a dreary treatise on the effects of foolish economic dalliances, weighing down the audience with a fierce and unrepentant reality. Thankfully, Up in the Air manages to keep its feet firmly on the ground during most of its running time, not shying away from presenting the human cost of recession and the advances of technology, but at the same time presenting it in such a way as to be palatable nonetheless.

There is one unfortunate problem in Up in the Air, though, one which I shall address quickly. While George Clooney’s travelling terminator Ryan Bingham is an affable, charismatic person, Clooney’s performance reminiscent of Cary Grant at his best, Up in the Air does make the mistake of presenting him as a bit too charismatic. While the montages of employees reacting to the consequence on Bingham’s speaking with them are often blunt and heart-rending, particularly so given that the majority of them did actually lose their jobs to the recession and are saying their words from the heart rather than reading from a script, the times we are shown Bingham directly firing an employee do come across as sugar-coated. While his young tag-along, Natalie, gets the difficult cases – a woman who threatens suicide, a 57-year-old auto worker with nowhere to go – Bingham easily coaxes his victims into a state of neutered acceptance. While this may be Bingham’s job, he seems to do it all too easily, and while those he has fired to leave the room sad, one gets the feeling that they’ll all get up tomorrow and immediately achieve their dreams, just because Bingham said the right thing to them. It dances around the issue a little bit, and by the end of the film, it does feel like some of the good work screenwriters Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner do is undermined by Bingham’s elevation to a near-mythic status of persuasiveness.

However, dwelling on that problem for too long can mean that one can miss the point of Up in the Air – rather than being a film about the recession, Jason Reitman’s third film in the director’s chair is a film about isolation and connection set against the backdrop of a shaky economic climate. Clooney’s Bingham is a man who prides himself on his lack of personal ties – he presents a seminar that actively encourages purging yourself of your relationships, he rarely talks to anyone he’s known for more than ten minutes, and he shows great reluctance when asked to do something nice for his soon-to-be-wed sister. However, underneath that charmingly disconnected exterior, there is a man looking for a relationship, a man slowly brought of his shell by his unwanted sidekick, cocky Cornell graduate Natalie (who is played by Twilight’s Anna Kendrick in a startlingly good performance, full of a hidden vulnerability and warmth and light years ahead of those hogging the limelight in that ‘film’), and by the disarmingly brash and sexy Alex (Vera Farmiga, doing decent work here). Reitman and Turner navigate Bingham’s personal awakening with subtlety and sharp characterisation, and while the film may be full of grandstanding moments (Bingham’s conferences, Bingham’s testing of Natalie, the ‘stereotyping’ monologue, the testing of Natalie’s proposed computer system), they never feel disingenuous or inserted for the purpose of making the film look ‘better’ and more ‘dramatic’. Up in the Air is a look at human relationships and how people approach them that always feels natural and believable, if never wholly realistic.

Up in the Air is smart, funny, dramatic and quietly optimistic, a film that may feel understated, but never cynically engineered to be so. With a fantastic performance from Clooney, a star-making turn from Kendrick, and some top-notch writing from Reitman and Turner,this is a film that balances its sensitive topical setting with some basic, subtly-conveyed human truths, and balances it with skill and style. . AG.

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Context, in art, is everything. Without context, Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt is just an old man singing about drug addiction. Without context, The Great Dictator is a cartoon about dictatorship. Without context, Tracey Emin’s bed is just a bed. And don’t even get me started on the work of Jean-Luc Godard. The problem that cinema has with this is that it takes so long to make a film that it’s pretty tricky for it to stay contextual. Up in the Air arrives as a “timely” recession-comedy, which certainly hits the right notes in that regard, though there is presumably an element of luck in just how timely it is. I dread to imagine a board meeting where some studio heads thought “let’s make a lightweight comedy about people being fired!”. It didn’t happen – this is Jason Reitman’s baby.

One bit of context, though, that is played on to some degree is that the central role is played by George Clooney. He plays Ryan Bingham, a man of Clooney’s age who has never properly grown up (not in a The Hangover kind of way, though) and has never settled down. He spends his entire life flying from place to place, his job basically being firing people, on a desperate quest to be the seventh man to clock up 10 million air miles.

Of course, Clooney is playing a single man of his age, who seems eligible enough but has issues with the idea of settling down. Anyone who knows the first thing about Clooney himself will be in the know – and indeed Clooney seems to be playing the role as himself (or rather his celebrity persona) – that smooth, fast talking charmer, that update of Cary Grant. So it’s a brave film for him to face from that perspective, and he gamely plays up to it. Bingham’s life is something he seems pretty happy with – we see the fetish-ized dead-spaces of hotel waiting rooms, airport lobbies, and queues. That is until a new girl with a bright idea – firing people over webcam – shows up (Anna Kendrick, who is great) and threatens to destroy his way of life. So he takes her on the road to try and convince her of his way of life – while she is startled that he has no life plan, has no desire to get married or have children, and absolutely no desire to be tied down.

Jason Reitman, produces, writes and directs, and it is interesting to see him return to a project of his own after the success (and backlash) of the Diablo Cody penned Juno. Indeed, this returns him to the more satirical elements of his debut feature, Thank You For Smoking. At least – for most of the running time it is. Surprise, Surprise, we find out that beneath Bingham’s life philosophy there may be a desire to be something more, and so the last third sets up a sister’s wedding and a hint that, actually, he might have the same desires as everyone else. This might neuter the rest of the story a little bit (although it is tempered by the ending), as you kind of wonder how Hollywood it’s all going to get.

As a lightweight comedy though, it all works. The smart directorial touches (the fact that real-life recently sacked people play the parts of people being sacked, the reference to Amélie, the title seemingly coming from a song written by one of the recently sacked people himself) work, and the film is a fine watch. Certainly, it would be no great travesty if it was to compete highly for Best Picture at the Oscars, as is being suggested. It’s a good piece of work, and I’m fascinated to see where Reitman goes next. . RS.
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