Jason Reitman's "Up In the Air' (1st review)

Director-screenwriter Jason Reitman started working on the screenplay for Up in the Air, based on a novel by Walter Kirn, back in 2002. Fortuitously, the project was shelved while Reitman made the independent favorites Thank You for Smoking (2005) and Juno (2007). Now the times have caught up with the story, which speaks sincerely, but with humor, to all of us who are edging our way gingerly through the current economic mess.

The protagonist, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), is a man who fires people for a living, crisscrossing the country to deliver bad news in his delicious baritone. He lives on the road— in the air, actually, accumulating Frequent Flyer miles with single-minded zeal— and he's happy in that limbo. While Ryan creates disconnections in the lives of others, he revels in them for himself. He's proud to have shed not only physical objects but emotional entanglements from his life, seeing them only as encumbrances.

Two different women arrive to interrupt the life routines that Ryan has honed to perfection. Natalie (Anna Kendrick) is a fresh-faced, smart but naÓ¯ve coworker whom he is assigned to mentor. Alex (Vera Farmiga) is, literally, a fellow traveler, with whom Ryan launches a passionate no-strings affair. Together and separately, these women cause him to re-evaluate his life.

No pat endings

Reitman's strength as a filmmaker lies in his ability to mix "comedy" and "drama" so thoroughly as to render the distinction meaningless— kind of like real life. His characters are three-dimensional people, not agglomerations of clichés and stereotypes, and they behave as real people do. In Reitman's films, some people learn from their experiences and others don't, so even when there's a happy ending, it doesn't feel pat or preordained.
He treats his characters with tremendous respect: the humor in this film, as in Juno, is never at a particular person's expense. (I haven't seen Thank You for Smoking, but I just put it at the top of my Netflix queue.)

This respect extends beyond the main characters to the dozens of people whom we see Ryan firing, many of them real workers who recently lost their real jobs. These people face the camera straight on and respond to it as though to the person who fired them, either as they had responded in real life or as they wish they had responded. The montages created from these reenactments are powerful, authentic and moving.

Lucky timing

Of course, some of the fired workers in Up In the Air are portrayed by actors. In his scenes with them, Clooney enacts vignettes in which Ryan wields the collection of stock phrases he's developed over the years. His detachment, however, is not unmixed with compassion. J.K. Simmons (who played the pregnant girl's father in Juno) has a lovely cameo as someone for whom Ryan's carefully honed platitudes may turn out to hold some truth.

Given how long it takes to make a movie, it's rare— and lucky — when one resonates so effectively with the zeitgeist. (Am I the only one who felt personally insulted by the release of Confessions of a Shopaholic last summer?) The movie's resonance, though, isn't just a matter of serendipitous timing. The script, the performances and the cinematography all reflect immense skill. Reitman just made it onto my list of directors whose movies I will automatically see.♦


To read a response, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.