The real tragedy?

Rating: 9/10 (21 January 2010)

And yes. Up in the Air is one of the finest crafted motion picture of year 2009. If you have any interest in it, go check out Clooney, his big-time young apprentice and Vera Farmiga in this movie.
No matter how much you try to take it as a comedy, it's essentially very sad in the undertone. And, after you know better and better how to write a proper satire, you'd know there's something fishy about Farmiga's character the moment you see her naked back. So, Up in the Air is not about revolutionary story structure, instead it's a good look at our daily miseries as we are more comfortable in calling them "daily lives".
Clooney's character Ryan Bingham reminds me of his performances in Coen brothers' comedies as well as in more serious dramas like Michael Clayton. It's a magically charming character with very deep sense of exhaustion and sadness restrained, but with robotic professional attitude embedded. This mixed feeling of reality and its funny side is even deepened when his young apprentice/competitor Natalie(with a surprising performance from young actress Anna Kendrick) interacts with him. "The man who's ready to make a connection" the tag-line will be realized as an ultimate irony once you finished the movie. That's because everyone Clooney met and made friends with in the movie eventually would be "send off" by him(willingly or unwillingly). He makes emotional connections with people only because he's part of a mechanic that cuts undesirable ties when companies decided to do some laying off.
If we try to double the irony and sadness in Juno and Thank You for Smoking, we would finally get something like Up in the Air. Except this one gives you more chills when you walk out of the theater. "Do I deserve to be treated like a machine, a used one?" You may ask. Well, that's the question I often ask myself, but if you, like me, always have treat yourself as a dedicated working machine, then the answer is undoubtedly yes. The movie showed different mindsets of people dealing with families, goals in the life, etc......One scene that caught me was when Clooney attached the "gnome pictures" he shot for his little sister to the USA map. That's when he realized there's something more valuable in the life he missed. While Ryan Bingham the 10-million-miles loyal flight passenger haven't got an option but had to fly on, I prayed for myself to have an option not to be like him. God bless America.