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Directed by Jason Reitman
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Up In The Air The
New York Times critic Mahnola Dargis
calls “Up In The Air” a ‘stealth tragedy,’ a
wonderfully apt phrase for this strange feature. George Clooney, currently
America’s leading candidate for the mantle of film icon (think Cary
Grant), plays a man whose job is to fly around the country and fire people
whose own corporations are a) too big; b) too chicken, or c) too uninterested
in their employees to do it themselves.
Clooney, as Ryan Bingham, has his own goal,
which is not to fire the maximum number of people but to achieve the 10
million mark in airline miles – something only six other people have
ever done. So Bingham is
constantly on the move, flying from city to city, staying at mid-range
hotels, delivering the stunning news to unsuspecting people, then moving on. One
night in a hotel bar he meets Alex Goran, played by
the subtle and brilliant actress Vera Farmiga
– one of those women whose career was cut short by age --- that is,
she’d grown out of the ingenue roles and was
left – fortunately for us – to play character parts, as she does
here, not using her looks but her talent. She is also a road warrior, though not
in Ryan’s field. Her home
is in Chicago, but she and he make dates to meet in Miami, San Diego, and
maybe a dozen other cities where their schedules coincide. One day he asks her to his
sister’s wedding in Wisconsin, and she accepts. He is transformed by the experience
and begins doubting his own choice of life-styles. In
the meantime he’s been given as a kind of apprentice a young woman just
out of Cornell, Natalie Keener (played by the very good Anna Kendrick, who
has her own innovation to try out – namely doing it all by
teleconferencing, thereby saving on all those air fares. What works out and what doesn’t
quite, in “Up In The Air,” I’ll leave to you to see for
yourself. Let’s just say
the phrase ‘Stealth Tragedy’ is accurate and leave it there. The film was written and directed by
Jason Reitman, who made “Juno” and
“Thank You For Smoking.”
He knows what he’s doing. |