Reviews
Up In The Air
January 15 2010
Jason Reitman
Starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick
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Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) spends his whole life in the wild blue yonder, jetting across America downsizing companies and firing people. He takes no pleasure from his role as a ‘transitional counsellor’ – it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it, and Ryan just happens to possess the requisite blend of steeliness, affability and detachment to do it very, very well.
Once it’s done, he packs his hand luggage (no wasteful check-ins for a seasoned pro like Bingham), scarfs down a bowl of complementary peanuts in a faceless business class lounge, and sits pretty at cruising altitude, zooming ever closer towards his cherished dream of being one of the very few people ever to rack up 10 million air miles.
Like a shark, Bingham’s only motivation is incessant motion. He has no real home, no friends or emotional ties, and that’s just the way he likes it. But when head office calls him back to base and informs him that, henceforth, his job will be done via videoconferencing and that he can hang up his wings – along with his million mile dreams – cracks start to form in his immaculate GQ veneer. He gradually comprehends that the hermetic, temperature controlled insularity with which he has cocooned himself might not serve him so well back on terra firma. And won’t be so easy to slough off.
As an allegory for the dislocation that the modern world can foster, and the atomisation of the family unit in whatever form, Jason Reitman’s ultimately wan adaptation of Walter Kirn’s novel couldn’t proceed from a finer set-up. Comfort, ease and the pointlessly rinky-dink trappings of the world around him have seduced Bingham to the point where he no longer needs human interaction, and Reitman explores this mindset with a good deal of wit and style. When the film strands Bingham on the Tarmac, however, things become a good deal more complicated for him, and – alas – immediately and supremely formulaic for us.
His boss (a bearded Jason Bateman) foists a bright young hotshot (Anna Kendrick) on him, through whom he learns that his job affects more lives than he imagined. A casual relationship with a similarly self-satisfied high-flyer (Vera Farmiga) gives Bingham a glimpse of the life he might have had. While a family wedding offers him a chance to come back into the fold.
None of this is at all hard to watch, but it feels like the second half of the film is a Movie of the Week continuation of the first. What begins as a surprisingly successful mixture of Michael Clayton and Intolerable Cruelty eventually skirts uncomfortably close to the as-yet-unfilmed epilogue to Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Anticipation:
Enjoyment:
In Retrospect:
Having enjoyed the book, I'm very disappointed with the adaptation – they have completely blanded Bingham out.
And whilst there's nothing wrong with Clooney being Clooney, can this role seriously be considered Oscar worthy, even in such a thin year?
Written by DavidDaglish on January 16th, 2010 at 14:48
Just saw this last night – and was seriously underwhelmed. I've since read a few reviews that say it only loses its way in the second half, but I found it lacking from the off. It has that "plinkety-plonkety" music that's there to point out how "quirky" and "offbeat" it all is. Now I don't mind quirky, but if you're laying your quirky credentials on the table, please please please give me a smart script to get lost in and characters that mean something. Give me a script that presents people I want to love, hate, like, admire, laugh at, get angry with – or at least am intrigued by, people that I care about spending time with. I think it's telling that I was also left pretty much unmoved by the cast of heads talking about losing their jobs (it's only afterwards I learned that lots of these heads were apparently genuinely recently unemployed).
So I guess I mostly felt underwhelmed, as at no point does the script feel like it has the courage of its convictions. A case in point was the scene in which Clooney gives an actually-quite-funny analysis of what queue to stand in at an airport, depending on its age/ race/ gender composition… but just in case we didn't get the point a supporting character then has to remark "that's racist".
I never forgot I was watching scripted actors trying to join up some dots along the film's "journey", and this just compounded itself in situations like the one in which Clooney unconvincingly convinces someone to make a major marital decision, and another in which there's an emotional crying fit in a hotel lobby, and so on.
2 out of 5
Written by @TheSanchoPlan on January 17th, 2010 at 14:58
I saw it a couple of weeks ago and didn't find many redeeming qualities except for a few laughs here and there, and I can get that on the Tonight Show….wait….maybe not. In the end, it seems like a depressing and pointless film that had bad pacing and not really much of a message. There were several points at which an insightful message on humanity might have been communicated, but to me the message was unsent, like an e-mail placed in the draft mailbox forever. It gets a B-minus for giggles, which means you should just wait for it on cable, as far as I'm concerned.
Written by Jim on January 22nd, 2010 at 18:11
I laughed a lot during this movie, but came away quite disturbed..depressed, even. The message seemed to be that only the married/coupled-with-kids can possibly be happy. The rest of us (and I'm a singleton in my 40s! — shock, horror!) must be fated to miserable, lonely and unfulfilled lives… I was also uncomfortable about the way that the only sackees given substantial lines were men, and they all made much about how they could no longer support their Families and would lose the respect of their kids… None of the women mentioned this. Are we to believe a) That only those with families feel awful about losing their jobs and b) No woman is financially responsible for a family??
In the end, for all the laughs, I felt this film was just another peddling the Hollywood Dial-a-Theme lecture on the beauties of the Famleh. How much more interesting would it have been if it had addressed the INDIVIDUAL pain of being sacked….?
Written by Annith on January 23rd, 2010 at 16:53
Adam,
Adam,
I'm disappointed in this review – it is a lazy piece of journalism.
Of the 444 words you are responsible for, maybe just 15% are spent analysing the movie – the remainder are a basic rehash of the plot.
Please try to respect your readership and put more effort into explaning why you believe a movie is or isn't worth seeing.
Written by Mike Davies on January 26th, 2010 at 23:55
great post Mike- was thinking exactly the same
Written by Joe on February 2nd, 2010 at 06:02
Annith, it's not saying that only married people with children are happy at all. The part with his family clearly demonstrates that. It's talking about all loved ones, whether you're marries, single, whatever, because Clooney clearly doesn't get the girl in the end, but he realized he needs the people he loves to be in his life.
Written by Nick on February 25th, 2010 at 06:40