Finding Levity

Rating: 8/10 (10 June 2010)

With only 3 feature films under his belt, Jason Reitman has developed a unique cinematic language for his own interesting voice; unlike his father (Ivan Reitman, most renowned for the "Ghostbusters" franchise), he is less interested in big-budget blockbuster film-making, and more passionate about intimate tales that turn their characters inside-out. His Awards-hungry "Juno"--while not a perfect film by far--established a teenager who was by turns arrogant, callous, and clearly unaware of the grownup responsibility that came with her pregnancy; by the end of the film, however, it was clear that she had undergone a series of epiphanies and personal discoveries that not only forced her to confront the reality of her situation, but transformed her character into something heart-wrenchingly believable. The same finely nuanced character development occurs in "Up in the Air": George Clooney (who comes across as a close cousin to Aaron Eckhart's character in Reitman's debut, "Thank You for Smoking") plays a corporate shark/motivational speaker, who, by his own admission, spends only 40 days at his Omaha apartment out of the year; the rest of the time, he is boarding endless flights around the country, firing workers on behalf of companies who don't have the brass to do it themselves. Initially, Clooney's character comes across as an arrogant gloss on Michael Clayton, and is very hard to like (there is a palpable coldness to the way he and fellow jet-setter Vera Farmiga "bond" over frequent-flyer miles and online itineraries); it is only after meeting plucky-yet-emotionally-fragile Anna Kendrick (the brainchild behind an depersonalized online method of firing workers en masse) that Clooney undergoes a change in attitude, going from a man who loves to be surrounded by people without actually connecting to anyone, to a man who realizes that he might be missing out. Reitman, who co-wrote the script with Sheldon Turner, lets the image speak for itself: while the characters are clearly works of fiction (and contrived in their own ways to meet the script's needs), the snap of their dialog and shared experiences seldom rings less than true. By its ambiguous close, "Up in the Air" has gone from a study of alienated (and alienating) people to a near-revelation in how we, as human beings, disconnect from one another without even knowing it.