I've been a little busy lately (working on a script for a play I'm doing in June) but finally have a chance to catch up on some two-month-old Netflix. Considering that I'm usually twenty-plus years behind the times on this blog, sitting down to write about Up In The Air damn near counts as current events.
Dealing as it does with the unemployment crisis, Up In The Air is still relevant (though of course one hopes it becomes a curio of past troubled times as soon as possible). And in many important senses—it being extremely well written, directed, and acted—it always will be. Jason Reitman is a serious filmmaker. He's three pictures into a career that, barring some sudden decision to deviate into the good ol' coke-hookers-and-apathy egomania trap, should continue to be impressive. He has a brilliant sense of pace, and tells stories economically, but most impressively he never shows off. He's like, here's my protagonist, here's the story, here's some really good dialogue that serves to tell this story rather than show off how clever I am, there we go. What I like about Jason Reitman's pictures so far is that he never seems to feel the need to do all kinds of artificial shit to make the audience like his protagonists. In Thank You For Smoking, his debut, Aaron Eckhart is a fucking asshole: he's a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. Reitman doesn't try and make that look cool, he just shows you this human being with a borderline supernatural ability to persuade, and shows how eventually that guy organically learns how to (kind of) use his powers for good. Juno doesn't really count, since Reitman didn't write it, but Ellen Page kind of fits, as she's a human being who gets irritated, isn't always nice, kind of takes Michael Cera for granted but eventually comes to her senses at the end.
Up In The Air, though, has a higher difficulty curve. In any other hands but George Clooney's, protagonist Ryan Bingham is an irredeemable shit. He's charming because George Clooney is. You resist the temptation to shoot him in the fucking face because, come on, dude, it's George Clooney. Here's a guy who fires people for a living in the nightmare economy created by George Bush (or Dick Cheney, if you want to get technical). He never feels any guilt about what he does. His highest ambition in life is to accumulate 10 million frequent flier miles. And yet . . . he's George Clooney. This should put to rest any tut-tutting about George Clooney's alleged shortcomings as an actor. The fucking guy pulls off alchemy in this role. He makes you care about someone who should be dropped out of one of his beloved American Airlines jets without a parachute. I say this guy's a goddamn genius.The story opens by showing us George Clooney living his dream life: flying around the country, firing people (in such a way that they almost feel like he's doing them a favor; Zach Galifianakis, in a terrific cameo early on says “When will I see you again?” with such naked, painful need that it's like Clooney's his only friend) and living his life in airplanes and hotels. He meets a woman who's, apparently, “you with a vagina” as Vera Farmiga bluntly puts it. They compare corporate-traveler badges of honor, and subsequently genitalia. By which I mean they shtup.
But trouble, as it so often does, seeps into paradise. George Clooney's gaping asshole boss (Jason Bateman, who's so fucking good at playing total jerkoffs—hell, even when he's the good guy on Arrested Development he's such a brilliantly passive-aggressive douchebag—that he almost steals the movie from George fucking Clooney) brings in a perky young prodigy (Anna Kendrick, who's great in this) who has a new-media strategy that makes Clooney's job redundant. But he will not go gently into that good night, and takes her on a whirlwind tour to prove how irreplaceable his skills are, lest Jason Bateman decide to make him fire people over a computer screen.
The trip ends up not actually accomplishing what Clooney intends it to do, since all he manages to do is make her realize how much firing people sucks. It does show him, through talking with one of those alarmingly conservative young people the world is so full of these days, that his carefree libertine ways are not the only path, and she loosens up a bit, but not unrealistically.
Clooney runs into Vera Farmiga again, and starts to fall for her. When Anna Kendrick's boyfriend breaks up with her via text message (which, after the revolution, I will make sure my Minister of the Interior enforces as a capital offense) Clooney and Vera Farmiga take her out and get her fucked up, and she ends up shtupping some douchebag and leaving before he wakes up. She doesn't much like it, though, upon further reflection.
Clooney and Anna Kendrick continue on their tour, scored brilliantly to Dan Auerbach's "Goin' Home" (the soundtrack is terrific, with the title song over the closing credits a particular highlight). The trip concludes with Anna Kendrick firing a woman who informs her, dispassionately, that she's going to go home and commit suicide, which shakes Anna Kendrick up, but Clooney tells her it's nothing, they all say that. When they return home, Jason Bateman says fuck it, we're going with her teleconferencing idea, Clooney, you're grounded. Clooney finds, much as that kinda sucks, that what he most wants to do is bring Vera Farmiga with him to his sister's wedding. Clooney accidentally convinces his brother-in-law-to-be (Danny McBride) to get cold feet, and Clooney's other sister tells him straight up, you fucked this up, you fucking deal with it, and Clooney gives Danny McBride this speech about the best moments in life being with another person (you see Clooney talking himself into it over the course of the speech, in some nice thesping) and all ends up well.
EXCEPT. When Clooney goes to Chicago to see Vera Farmiga—in a sequence that struck me as being weirdly cliched in its “this is the part of the romantic movie where the guy realizes he loves the woman” vibe, down to him running through the airport, just barely making the plane, before I realized what was really going on—he finds out . . . she's married and has a family. Whoops.
I already thought Up In The Air was a well-made, well-played movie, but that it has the balls to just fuck George Clooney in the heart like that (a subject I personally know plenty about) was really impressive. He just goes home to Omaha and gets back to work, grumpily but dutifully. On the way, he reaches his 10 millionth mile, and the pilot (Sam fuckin Elliott, baby, recognize) comes out and does the whole gladhanding bit. Clooney tells him he'd been playing this moment out in his mind, thinking of what he would say, but that now that it's happened he totally forgot what he was going to say.
When he gets back home, Jason Bateman comes in to say that the woman who told Anna Kendrick she was going to kill herself actually did. Clooney isn't so much bothered by that as by the fact that it made Anna Kendrick quit, so he decides to do her a solid and write her a recommendation letter for her new job. Jason Bateman scraps Anna Kendrick's teleconferencing idea when she leaves, and so the movie ends where it begins, with George Clooney on a plane to somewhere, on his way to fire someone.
Not exactly the happiest ending in the world, but it's honest. I had been a little worried about George Clooney and Vera Farmiga getting together, because while they really dug each other, Clooney settling down with someone would have been stupid Hollywood bullshit. Even if they didn't end up with each other, Clooney completely repudiating his life would have been stupid Hollywood bullshit too. Instead, we end with a guy who's a little more self-conscious about getting older than he once was, who hasn't suddenly, magically learned to get along with people, who probably asks the flight attendant for a couple more cocktails per trip than he used to.
What's encouraging to me is that, ambivalent “George Clooney is an island in the sky” ending aside, Up In The Air made a shitload of money. I had forgotten this; I actually originally started this paragraph by talking about it having been a disappointment at the box office and that being the death knell sounded for pictures by, about, and for adults that don't end conveniently. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you fact check. I mean, sure, it had a major movie star in the lead, but George Clooney movies aren't always hits (matter of fact, unless he's playing Danny Ocean, they usually aren't). Let's hope that Jason Reitman takes those nice box-office figures as a sign to carry on as he has, rather than buying him too much hookers and blow. Though I'm sure he's a smart enough guy and talented enough filmmaker, he could even make an interesting thoughtful picture about hookers and blow. Excelsior, Mr. Reitman!
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