The year's smartest, most intelligent American comedy

Rating: 9/10 (21 January 2010)

Before "Up in the Air" Jason Reitman was the smart new kid on the block who made a smart comedy about corporate greed, ("Thank you for Smoking"), and a better one, ("Juno"), about real people with real feelings coping, quite magnificently, with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that life throws at us. Now he has combined the two disparate themes; "Up in the |Air" is the year's smartest, most intelligent comedy. It's let down, ever so slightly, by a smidgen of sentimentality but picks itself up again to be at least realistically dour in its resolution. (The film's 'happy ending' isn't the unlikely one we might have predicted).
It's about the ultimate corporate man, Ryan Bingham, (a never better George Clooney), whose job it is to tell others they no longer have one. It's a dirty business but Ryan is basically a nice guy whose charm goes some way to softening the blow. What he tells the poor suckers getting the chop may be a load of bull but he has the knack, most of the time anyway, of making it sound like a life opportunity. He does this by flying all over America, spending over 200 days a year away from his drab apartment, living in plush hotel rooms with all their perks. He's happier in an airport lounge than most people would be in a palace. One of the perks is Alex, (an equally superb Vera Farmiga), another frequent flyer he meets in an hotel bar and with whom he starts a no-strings relationship. (They are turned on by each others plastic). And then one day it all threatens to come crashing down when the company hires Natalie, a young whippersnapper, who has designed a programme that allows people to get fired on-line thus eliminating 'the personal touch' and the very expensive travel costs. Ryan's life threatens to implode and he's given the task of taking Natalie on the road with him and showing her the ropes. What happens, of course, is that in the process these two corporate killers manage to humanize each other, or rather find within themselves the humanity that was always there.
This mature, grown-up comedy is easily Reitman's best film to date. If the analogies with Capra, Hawks and Billy Wilder seem a trifle premature there is no doubt that Reitman is someone to watch. There is nothing fancy about his style of direction; he relies on the quality of his script, (in this case co-written with Sheldon Turner from a novel by Walter Kim), and the ability of his actors to deliver. As Ryan criss-crosses the country his journey, from one city to the next, or rather from airport to airport or hotel to hotel, is introduced by aerial shots of the landscape. This is about as show-offy as it gets. "Up in the Air" may be the title but this movie has its feet firmly planted on terra-firma and is all the better for it. The three leads, (newcomer Anna Kendrick as Natalie is another name to watch; think Amy Adams without the cute factor), are all superb and there is a lot of talk, all of it good. Here, at last, is a mainstream film aimed at an intelligent, adult audience, funny and sad in about equal measure and very much like the way we live today.