The problem with seeing a film that has received a lot of very positive reviews is obvious. It really has to be fantastic to live up to the hype. I won’t say Jason Reitman’s new movie, Up in the Air, fails the test but I also didn’t leave the theater captivated, as I largely had been with Reitman’s previous effort, Juno.
There’s a lot to like about the film. For starters, the cast is wonderful, pairing George Clooney with two different women, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick, who each in their own way manage to play off Clooney very effectively.
Farmiga and Clooney, as fellow corporate road warriors, simply sizzle with sexuality, something we haven’t seen with Clooney since Steven Soderbergh cast him in Out of Sight (a remarkably underrated film) opposite Jennifer Lopez. And a bank robber and a Fed (their characters in Soderbergh’s film) are a lot easier to make sexy than two frequent fliers comparing mileage programs.
Clooney is more of a business mentor figure to Kendrick’s character, but they each view their work and personal lives from such different perspectives that the opportunity for fireworks exists. Kendrick is terrific as the newly minted corporate climber who realizes midway through that she has no stomach for the personal sacrifices and is too honest to pretend otherwise.
A lot of the credit goes to Clooney, whose classic good looks, debonair masculinity, and tongue in cheek self-deprecating humor haven’t been seen onscreen since Cary Grant. I know some people don’t like him or feel that he’s always playing a version of himself, but take a look at Cary Grant’s body of work (e.g., The Philadelphia Story and North by Northwest) and tell me he wasn’t a great actor.
Clooney certainly seems to be playing a version of himself in Up in the Air, riffing off of his personal aversion to marriage, but he also makes believable his role as a professional termination specialist (his company is hired to fire employees) who lives out of a suitcase whether in some generic Ramada Inn or back “home” in Omaha.
Reitman is clearly a highly gifted writer and director. The scenes are spare and poignant, the dialogue witty and believable. So why doesn’t he hit a home run?
One thing that didn’t work for me was the use of actual footage of people being fired. I’m not sure if this brainstorm came to Reitman as a way to add some verisimilitude or in an attempt to be sensitive during the current economic crisis, but it has the effect of taking us away from the dramatic story and either being preachy or distracting. If Reitman wanted to send a message that American capitalism can hurt individuals emotionally as well as economically, I think he could have done a more subtle and effective job by focusing on the fallout to the central characters. American Beauty, for example, portrayed the alienation of corporate life in suburbia to devastating effect by making Kevin Spacey’s character truly a tragic figure. We get an inkling that Vera Farmiga’s character’s home life may be something like Spacey’s onscreen wife (played by Annette Benning), but this is never fleshed out in any detail in Up in the Air except to provide the plot twist that she isn’t quite the free agent Clooney’s character has hoped. Without any moral resolution, Reitman let’s most of his characters off the hook.
Come to think of it, we got a similarly squishy ending in Juno, when the title character keeps her baby and reunites with the high school dad. While it somewhat echoed The Graduate in providing a provocative “what now?” moment, somehow the ‘60s counterculture stakes of Elaine Robinson abandoning her pre-arranged ‘50s marriage to run off with Benjamin despite (because of?) his affair with her own mother seemed justified. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder: What exactly was Juno rebelling against by carrying her baby to term and keeping it? Planned Parenthood? Her wise-cracking father was way cool and would have loved her either way, so why mess up her life for the sake of doing the surprisingly retro-‘50s thing?
At this point I may be invoking a bit too much in terms of cinematic history, so let’s go back to Up in the Air. For me, so much of a movie is about the script and I can’t help thinking that if Jason Reitman ever hooks up with a screenplay that is deeply worthy of his talents, something on the order of Alexander Payne’s Election, then he’s going to have a world-beater on his hands. In the meantime, he’s making films that are still head and shoulders above the typical commercial dross to be found at the multiplex, and that isn’t anything to dismiss.