Movie review: Up in the Air

Movie review: Up in the Air

Starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman
Opens Friday at: AMC cinema.
Parents’ guide: language.

Beware the elevated expectations that may accompany Up in the Air.
The collaboration between hot writer-director Jason Reitman (Juno, Thank You for Smoking) and George Clooney (of George Clooney fame) has been highly anticipated and praised to the skies in early reviews.
But this very contemporary dramatic comedy is both more and less than the sum of its raves.
Clooney is Ryan Bingham, a man who works for a firm that fires people so their own companies won’t have to face the ugly truth of what they’re doing to human lives.

Though his outfit is based in Omaha and he nominally lives there himself, Bingham spends 322 days a year travelling and “43 miserable days at home” – if the soulless apartment he rents could possibly be called home.
Bingham travels for a living. His most prized possession is his frequent-flyer card, his ultimate goal being 10 million miles and membership in an exclusive club.

Up in the Air was shot in the early, dire economic months of this year, and it is to Reitman’s credit that he chose real, recently terminated people to react to Bingham’s news they’d just been let go. The job market is bad for them, but good for Bingham and his amoral boss, Jason Bateman’s Craig Gregory. It’s the “worst time,” he says cheerily. “This is our moment.”

Bingham lives for his perks, and the hotels and airports he negotiates so well while others fume. So it’s only fitting he meet his female professional equivalent over drinks in a hotel bar. Her name is Alex (Vera Farmiga, so good in Breaking and Entering, and The Departed). What she does for a living is not stated, but it involves travel, itineraries, computers and cellphones. When they hook up, they plot their next assignation by comparing skeds on laptops.

Taking their paperless universe one step further, Gregory wants Bingham to meet Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a crackerjack new employee who’s come up with a way to streamline the business. Why waste time and money travelling when you can climb on a teleconferencing system and can people over the phone?
Bingham responds like a man defending his life, which is no distance from the truth. He loves his rootless, privileged existence. He also holds some old-school credence to wrecking lives in person. So he takes Natalie along to show her what it is he really does.

Up in the Air is the curious hybrid of modern cautionary tale and shimmery Hollywood comedy. It is well-written, well-acted, by turns funny, rueful and a kick in the head. It gives Clooney an opportunity to show the full range of the substantial talents he has displayed in movies from Ocean’s Eleven to Syriana, and has the good sense to make Alex both a real woman and Bingham’s rootless mirror image.

But in the end, as he looks at the departure board in another nameless airport, an earlier reference to him comes to mind. “It was just somebody who’s lost.” Can an audience’s hopes hang by such a slim existential thread?

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