A lightweight serious look at a jet age nomad, with Clooney his natural best

Rating: 8/10 (6 March 2010)

Up in the Air (2009)
Working with a witty, contemporary script and a casting a great leading actor seems like an easy enough bartender's recipe. And for a third time, director Jason Reitman pulls off a movie that is fresh, crisp, and sometimes touching. Thank You for Smoking was a kind of Luke warm warm up, but next came the fabulous Juno, a hard act to follow. Up in the Air is somewhere between the two in sentiment and success, not a bad place to be. It's a terrific movie at its best.
I mention all three films because they have a consistent flavor. And they all build around a very serious kernel, in this case, about the loneliness of a business traveller always flying from city to city. It gets exaggerated here, but not with comic excess (as with Smoking). Clooney's Ryan Bingham is just this side of believable. When he meets a Alex (played with perfect energy by Vera Farmiga) who seems to be his female vagabond counterpart, and they hit it off, it looks like we know the arc of the movie ahead. (We don't.)
The more obvious plot, about a firm that turns to iChat (computer screen conversation) to fire people, is laced with tragedy, but it is a set up for a series of laughs, too, and in the end isn't the most important element at all. (The timing is great though, talking about firing people left and right during high unemployment.)
No, the real point has to do with Bingham's existence as a jet age nomad. Up in the Air lacks any sense of visual art, for me. The camera-work is professional and undistracting, but lacks some of the effective elements of, say, Lost in Translation, which has the one similarity of a the traveller in another place without possessions and with nothing really to do outside of work. Up in the Air hints at bigger potential here at the end, with Clooney in front of the departure schedule, and the camera suddenly seems to contribute in this host, and the next, which reverses direction, and then for the ending, and its surprising, cool, almost tragic certainty. A great ending.
The music seems a carryover from the light, folk-tinged singsong pieces that made Juno really special, but it makes no sense here. This isn't a movie about highschoolers, or about innocence, but about either being very adult (Ryan and Alex) or about becoming an adult (as we see in the quirky and complicated third character played with precision by little known Anna Kendrick). The third thread in the plot(s) about Ryan's sister's marriage is more useful than moving, and more for comic effect than really building any depth, but it does give us a chance to see Ryan think out loud. And change. And confront loneliness.