Down on the Ground.

Jason Reitman's multiple-Oscar-nominee Up in the Air is a fascinating picture. At first glance, it's a likeable portrayal of Ryan Bingham, a professional business traveler and corporate employee-firing contractor played in his usual pebble-voiced and sexy-swagger style by every woman's favourite actor and fantasy bunk-muffin, George Clooney. He’s immensely cute as the disconnected anti-human-resources terminator-for-hire. He picks up Vera Farmiga, another traveling business shark in a hotel bar, they do the nasty and plan their next naked-rendezvous on their laptops, not even bothering to look at each other while they coordinate an future intersecting (lay)over. When the sun comes up, they get dressed and reenter the world of an ailing economy.


Up in the Air comes off initially as an enjoyable romp – for all the talk about it's relevance as a contemporary social commentary, it doesn't really have anything to say about it - which simultaneously keeps it from being either too depressing and/or too enlightening. It also keeps most of the real consequences of the train-wreck that is the American economy pinned down by a verbal crossfire of glib one-liners from the various corporate hawks that are the film's quasi-heroes. The few attempts at expressing the deeper implications of the collapse of America's middle class are limited to mournful sound-bite responses from the recently-fired. “But what will I do?”, they ask from one side of the table. “Be all you can be”, the blank answer from the other.

The more you consider and think on Up in the Air, the more troubling it becomes. This is a film that's essentially about the ugliness that pervades contemporary American society, but Reitman refuses to shine a light inside the Pandora's box he pretends to, but clearly hasn't, opened. Every reaction in Up in the Air seems once-removed from what it should be. In a particularly telling scene, Bingham's chippy sidekick Natalie (an impossibly naïve 23-year-old corporate darling who has perfected a sort of remote Skype-like mass firing software suite) is devastated by the news that one of their on-site firings resulted in the woman's suicide. Clooney's character springs to action, but instead of writing to the victim's family, he scratches out a glowing job-reference for his young co-worker. This scene underlines what's essentially wrong with Up in the Air. Its focus regularly shifts from the actual tragedy to the protagonist's reaction to that tragedy. Only the privileged are granted emotions. The movie simply ignores the woman who’s killed herself in favour of giving a close-up on Natalie, who weeps about how it happened on her watch and how sorry she feels for herself. She ends up with a kick-ass job, by the way.

“To know me is to fly with me,” Clooney says in an early voice-over, which brings up another tedious problem with Up in the Air. The entire film often feels like one big commercial for the likes of American Airlines, Hertz and the Hilton Hotel chain. The product placement is so thick on the ground you could choke on it Up in the Air. The film takes on the air of stale recirculated airplane air and one wonders if theatre managers were meant to reduce the oxygen mix during showings.

Up in the Air constantly places the privileged/wealthy on a higher plane (sorry – couldn't resist). In the second act, Clooney and Farmiga make a yearning-for-the-past pit stop to attend his poor-white-trash sister’s poor-white-trash wedding. Bingham waltzes in, saves the day with his wise words, feels the pinch of having abandoned his roots and takes off with a nagging doubt about his life-choices. In an effort to reconnect with his humanity, he makes an impromptu flight to visit Farmiga in Chicago, only to discover that his connecting-flight temp(-tress) is happily married-with-children herself. In another bit of misplaced sentiment, rather than direct our sympathies toward the family Farmiga is cheating on, “Up in the Air” plunges the camera in front of poor Ryan Bingham, furrowed brow and all. Poor fucker.

In retrospect, Up in the Air is a glossy and vaguely-insulting masquerade that makes the unusual demand of its audience to avoid subsequent contemplation about the underlying construct at the centre of the script. It mirrors the problem I had with the Coen's latest, A Serious Man because it begins to feel like a film that dismisses regular people in favour of those in the upper class. The difference between these two Best Picture nominees is the Coen's seem to be playing with regular folks like toy soldiers on an imaginary battlefield, blowing up their hopes and dreams in increasingly spectacular and sadistic ways while Reitman takes a different approach (with similar results) scripting a film about the toy-soldier generals themselves. If you want to see a film that actually tries to reorient the camera from the bottom up, take a look at Extract, not a great film by any stretch, but one with more heart than these two sorrowful head shakers put together.

In either film wins tonight, I'm firing everyone whose first name starts with "J" in protest.