BOOKS AND ARTS DECEMBER 4, 2009
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
The protagonist of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham, is a hatchet man for hire. The Omaha company that employs him, which goes by the Orwellian name Career Transition Counseling (CTC), rents him out to other companies to fire employees they don’t have the courage to fire themselves. He flies about the country, touching down briefly in Kansas City or Tulsa or Miami, to walk into offices he has never visited and tell workers he has never met that they are being let go. There are tears, and rages, and Bingham accepts them with unflappable grace.
Indeed, it quickly becomes clear that his detached demeanor is less a corollary of his job than vice versa. Charming and affable--did I mention he is played by George Clooney?--Bingham is nonetheless an emphatic rebuttal of John Donne’s adage about men and islands: romantically uncommitted, distant from family, and in pursuit of a side business as a self-help lecturer who preaches the gospel of emotional disencumbrance. Last year, he informs us, he spent 322 days traveling, “which means I had to spend 43 miserable days at home.” His true residence is a stool in the airport lounge, a room at the Hilton, a seat in the first class cabin. He is, quite literally, above it all.
At least, that is, until his boss (Jason Bateman) upsets the delicate equilibrium of his life by informing him that the wheels of capitalism require even more lubrication than CTC currently provides. A fresh-faced B-school graduate, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), has come up with a plan to fire folks via video link, a move that would end Bingham’s obsessive accretion of airline miles. When Bingham protests that she doesn’t understand the value of the face-to-face interaction, that “there is a dignity to what I do,” he is tasked with taking his young colleague on the road--or rather, to the air--to show her just exactly what that is.
In the course of his travels, Bingham encounters a kindred spirit in skirt and heels named Alex (Vera Farmiga), whose carnal enthusiasm is exceeded only by her aversion to emotional entanglement, a mirror to his own. (“Think of me as yourself,” she tells him, “but with a vagina.”) The two first meet in a hotel bar, of course, and conduct foreplay by comparing elite-status cards and frequent flyer miles. When he declines to disclose the latter figure, she places her palms a foot apart and inquires coyly, “Is it this big?” “I don’t want to brag,” he demurs. Her job requires nearly as much flight time as his, so the two meet for a series of romantic interludes at airport hotels, culminating with his invitation that she accompany him to his sister’s wedding, an experiment in intimacy on more than one front.
Reitman directs Up in the Air with a light touch, offering a kind of upbeat existentialism. Though it is a story about Bingham’s isolation, the character is in a near-constant state of interaction: with Alex, with Natalie, with his sister (Melanie Lynskey) and her fiancé (Danny McBride), and with the litany of unfortunates whom he steers gently into unemployment (including J. K. Simmons and Zach Galifianakis). This is a man who has kept to himself not by hiding from the world but by spreading himself across it so thinly that no one else ever has access to more than a sliver.
Clooney wears the role with such ease that it is difficult to imagine any other actor even attempting it. Smooth, intelligent, and exquisitely comfortable in his own skin, his Bingham is a born talker, whether coaxing a fired employee down from the ledge of despair or inviting a roomful of seminar attendees to empty their metaphorical “backpacks” of a lifetime’s worth of commitments. Moreover, the sharp, literate script (adapted from the Walter Kirn novel by Reitman and Sheldon Turner) offers Clooney a wealth of good lines with plenty left over for the rest of the cast, in particular the excellent Farmiga.
There are scattered missteps--a conversation with a reluctant groom that could have used a few more beats, a series of cameos by laid-off workers testifying to the Importance of Family that make the movie’s moral more explicit than it need have been--but overall Reitman delivers, with Clooney’s assistance, one of the nimblest grownup entertainments of recent years. (In light of this film’s quality and Jennifer’s Body’s distinct lack thereof, it is high time to reevaluate how much of Juno’s success was due to Reitman’s direction and how much to Diablo Cody’s script.)
If there is a broader complaint to be made of the film--and I’m of two minds whether there is--it’s that, it, too, floats along the surface a bit. With the exception of a wedding montage set to a song by the soon-to-be-far-better-known Sad Brad Smith, Up in the Air rarely makes a strong emotional connection. This may be inevitable in the case of Clooney’s character--it is, after all, difficult to care too deeply about the isolation of a man who does not care too deeply about it himself--but it extends to the rest of the film as well: the girl who has her heart broken, the workers whose lives are abruptly shattered.
This reluctance to dig deeper may be the difference between a very good film, which Up in the Air is by any reasonable measure, and a great one. As it is, Reitman has given us a witty, elegant movie that is nonetheless, like its protagonist, somewhat aloof from the vicissitudes experienced by mere mortals.
Christopher Orr is a senior editor of The New Republic.
For more TNR, become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
5 comments
Sounds a good deal like Intolerable Cruelty, a flick that I enjoyed and many did not.
- austinexpat
December 4, 2009 at 10:44am
Excellent review. I too had a warm, pleased reaction to the movie, and saw a great many things to like a lot, but I thought it could have been more than it was and better than it was. That's actually a tribute to many things about the movie: Clooney + Farmiga, Anna Kendrick's combination of cutthroat drive and girlish heart, the melancholy story with its unconventional -- and thought-provoking -- end, the intelligent, witty script, the fact that it is a major motion picture meant for sentient adults, the fact that it is a major motion picture plausibly about America Today. All that is welcome, and a welcome relief from most the stuff at the multiplex. And it's all so encouraging that you want the execution to be perfect and the movie to reach a bit higher -- to be a little more funny, a little more serious, a little more smart, a little more of all the things it was but maybe not quite enough. In trying to put my finger on what's responsible for its good-not-greatness, I came up with something like the following: First, the script does witty well, especially in the first half, but it struggles with what to say when it wants to get more serious. Second, the connection between the story and characters to America Today -- tough economic times and Clooney's job -- is maybe not deep enough. Even with the ham-handed documentary moment, during which actual victims of layoffs talk to the camera, it's not quite clear what Clooney's issue -- an insistence on traveling light in life -- has to do with unemployment. The book, I take it, satirized this business that Clooney and Kendrick are in, similar to the way Thank You for Smoking satirized the tobacco lobby. But the tone of the movie is not really satirical, and so the the firing stuff, though it is important to the plot and generates some fine scenes, ends up seeming a bit forced thematically. The point, I suppose, is to engender a feeling of humanity and to lament heartlessness, and the parallel is that Clooney eschews humanity in his personal life while America Today is becoming increasingly less human, as represented by Clooney's company's move to firing by video-conference. It's a bit awkward, because Clooney's attachment to "Airworld" would seem to put him on the wrong side, and yet he stands up for the face-to-face meetings and demonstrates sensitivity. It all *could* have worked better, and kind of works anyway, and maybe the problem is really my first point -- a struggle with what to say when things get serious. Instead of coming up with brilliant dialgoue, I fear Reitman relies too heavily on his cameos and his montage sequences to wrap things up. Wow, this year has been rough! I didn't see everything, but I can count the number of movies I was enthusiastic about on one hand: The Hurt Locker, Julie & Julia, Inglourious Basterds, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, and, now, Up in the Air, and even those are hardly flawless. What's great that's out there now that I must see?
- jhildner1
December 8, 2009 at 4:55pm
p.s. A couple of other minor problems with Up in the Air: Obtrusive product placement. The movie at times feels like an extended ad for American Airlines. Hertz, Hilton, Travelpro, and, most unlikely of all, the Chrysler Sebring likewise come in for big endorsements by the consummate business traveler. Problem no. 2: I don't like stand-in locations, especially when the location being stood-in for is my hometown, as though there aren't a decent number of people out there who will know that Chicago doesn't have town houses like Farmiga's and that that airport is nothing like O'Hare. And Clooney's character is an airport enthusiast besides! In one scene, he comically waxes architectural about St. Louis-Lambert, De Gaulle, and the TWA terminal at JFK. I pictured him -- the character -- sitting in the audience pshawing during the scene in O'Hare's non-existent terminal-to-gates train.
- jhildner1
December 8, 2009 at 5:11pm
A story about that obstrusive product placement. Apparently, American and Hilton didn't pay for the feature-length advertising, but instead made their facilities available free of charge. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/business/media/21adco.html?_r=1&8dpc
- jhildner1
December 21, 2009 at 12:34pm
1. It demeans Donne's great meditation and his poetry to call what we wrote a (mere) "adage". "History repeats itself" is an adage. This is not an adage: No man is an island, Entire of itself. Each is a piece of the continent, A part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less. As well as if a promontory were. As well as if a manner of thine own Or of thine friend's were. Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee. 2. The chick graduated at the top of her class at Cornell. I was never aware that Cornell is a B- school. 3. The movie had its subtleties and avoided nicely predictability but was so far from being “great” as opposed to the “pretty good” it was, that there seems no need to stretch to understand why. Anyone giving this movie much more than a 3 and a smidge out of 5 is too easily impressed. 4. Above it was said that 2009's "The Hurt Locker, Julie & Julia, Inglourious Basterds, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" were to be enthusiastic about. I didn't see the first-yet, agree about the second and think the third and fourth are symptomatic of the decline of civilization as we know it, both being well, and even better than well, acted, well crafted, gratuitous pieces of shit. They at their corelessness exemplify of Pascal's adage “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."
- basman
January 16, 2010 at 10:24pm