UP IN THE AIR – jason reitman – 3.9 / 10

Unlike most movie stars who really only play minor variations of a single character (Will Smith’s everyman good guy, Brad Pitt’s coolest guy in the room, Tom Cruise’s all American hero) George Clooney has a couple default modes. He’s either the witless idiot (O, Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, The Men Who Stare at Goats) or the suave sophisticate who’d rob you blind and get thanked for the privilege (Ocean’s Eleven, Three Kings, Michael Clayton). Up in the Air sees him earning critical raves for doing a combination of the two. And to be sure, Clooney’s performance is at least half of the (very limited) appeal of this boring, completely obvious ode to normal workaday life. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save what is, at bottom, a very tedious and rock solidly conservative piece of awards-baiting nonsense.


For the first twenty or so minutes, however, the film actually seems like it might be on to something. That first act, where Clooney’s Ryan Bingham describes his life as a man hired by companies to fire their employees, is witty, fast-paced and fun, full of short, snappy little scenes bursting with energy and life. The montage of Ryan checking in at various airports, breezing through security, getting his rental cars and settling into various hotel rooms is one of the best five minutes of film this year. But then, of course, the plot kicks in and the pace of the movie falls off a cliff.

See, somebody at Bingham’s firm has gotten the bright idea that, instead of firing people face to face (and wasting all the time and money on traveling to those people), it would be far cheaper to fire everyone over the internet using a souped-up version of iChat. So Ryan returns to his Omaha office and demands that he show the young whippersnapper who came up with this idea (Anna Kendrick, good but still not shaking off the stink of Twilight) what the job is really all about. So Ryan and his new sidekick Natalie spend the next hour or so of the film roaming the country while he tries to show her why his unencumbered life is so great and she tries to show him why good ol’ regular folks have it best. Guess which one ends up convincing the other?

For some reason, and I really cannot understand why this is, Hollywood seems incapable of making a film in which a main character can be happy while living a nontraditional life. If you see a movie with a character who seems well-adjusted and perfectly functional and normal except for the fact that he or she doesn’t have a spouse, a two-car garage and 2.5 kids, you can rest assured that by the end of the film, he or she will come to Jesus and accept that being just like everyone else is what they always secretly wanted.

And so it is with Ryan Bingham. After spending the whole film saying (and showing the audience) how great his life on the road is, once he meets Alex (Vera Farmiga, somehow looking ten years older than she did in The Departed) and sees his sister get married, all he really wants to do is settle down and put up a white picket fence. It’s enough to make you want to throw something.

Fortunately, Jason Reitman (directing his third film after the solid Thank You For Smoking and the god awful Juno) denies Ryan a totally happy ending and saves the film from turning completely schmaltzy, even if that twist is obvious from a mile away. Not so coincidentally, it’s probably this little twist at the end that’s earned Up in the Air all the Oscar buzz it’s been getting lately. If Reitman had gone for the (slightly) easier happy ending, this would be a throwaway film. Since there’s still a little angst left at the end of the movie, it’s getting Best Picture mentions.

I, for one, think that all the Oscar talk is because critics can’t resist a movie that has the cool guy end up envying the average Joe. Film critics have a regular job and regular lives. They probably have a spouse and a couple kids and live in a nice suburban home. And all week they watch and write about movies starring the most beautiful people in the world doing the most impossibly cool things imaginable. There’s no way critics don’t envy these people (both the actors and the characters they play) just a little. But then along comes Up in the Air, with its message that deep down even the coolest guys in the world, in this case Ryan Bingham (and George Clooney), envy the regular folks like them. I gotta think that message has to feel awfully good to those critics. At least, that’s the only explanation I can think of for why so much praise is heaped onto nonsense like this.

Up in the Air is boring, slowly paced and more obvious than your average kids’ movie. It’s clumsy and, except for a few scattered minutes here and there, artless (an abrupt switch to documentary style handheld camerawork about two-thirds of the way through being a particularly egregious example). And it unfortunately proves that rather than being an exception, Reitman’s Juno is the rule. But as long as this crap is rewarded with copious critical plaudits, we can probably expect quite a few more just like it. Hooray.