Up in the Air (2009) by Jason Reitman
starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga & Anna Kendrick
In a nuthsell: Loved it. Great acting, great directing, great character progression and an interesting ending. Jason Reitman has a bright future as a director.
Quick synopsis: Ryan Bingham lives his life on the road and despises the 43 days per year he has to spend at home. He thinks it's a life surrounded by people, but his family thinks that it's a life alone. A romance he strikes up leads him to reconsider his priorities.
Content: Although I haven't seen The Hurt Locker, I would not have had a problem with Up in the Air taking home either the Best Picture or Best Director Oscar. It's extremely well-crafted visually, and has a good story and very good characters to match. I also loved the interludes that featured aerial shots of various cities or snippets of people being fired. This was director Jason Reitman's 3rd movie (following Thank You For Smoking and Juno) and each one has gotten progressively better. Although he probably had a few advantages being the son of a successful director (Ivan Retiman - Ghostbusters, Stripes, etc.), his work speaks for itself and will probably continue to improve despite the fact that there isn't much room left to top Up in the Air.
Clooney is a tough nut to crack. When he tries comedy, it can go seriously awry (Leatherheads, Burn After Reading), but few people play "cool" better than him. In Up in the Air, Clooney uses the "cool" template, a la Danny Ocean, and layers on subtle insecurities beneath the polished exterior. Not too far from the character he played in Michael Clayton. Well done. His character is essentially a professional traveller, whose career whisks him from one city to the next in order to fire poor schmoes whose bosses don't have the balls to do the dirty deed themselves. He is a mercenary. Along the way he encounters 2 women, played by Vera Farmiga (The Departed) and Anna Kendrick (never heard of her before). The former is a kindred spirit - an experienced traveller with the same fondness for demonstrating her cool and aversion to displaying emotion. The latter's character is the complete opposite - a naive 23 year-old rookie whose ambitions and outspoken ideas get ahead of her maturity and preparedness to negatively influence people's lives the way Bingham does.
Both women were excellent and one of the best scene in the film was when they finally meet each other. By that time, we know both characters well, but watching them try to figure each other out gives us new insight that was impossible to glean from their interactions with Bingham. Bingham meanwhile sits back and soaks it all in, seeing sides of his two acquaintances he has not seen before, just as we are.
Up in the air explores themes of relationships and different lifestyles, but does a good job of not passing judgment. It simply lays out the different viewpoints of different characters and then lets them consider what is best for themselves. For a while it looks like it is taking a side by having one character drift slowly towards the other. But then, out of the blue (for me at least...friends have claimed they saw it coming), something happens that makes the audience reconsider what they think is best for that character. Perhaps this person was better off before being pushed towards a "better" lifestyle being the pushing was done under false pretenses and because this person truly loved how things were going.
Regarding this twist, I thought it was fantastic because I let the film lull me into a sense of security before it made its 180 degree turn. Yet the film did not cheat to do so. It let me trick myself because it seemed to be headed down some movie cliche paths. It let me make assumptions about what kind of story it was telling without really giving me any reason to do so. In other words, it let hundreds of cliched movies do the time-consuming setup work for it, while it spent its time much more wisely on developing the characters. Upon reflection, there were hints that the twist was coming, but the kind that you don't recognize until you already know where the story is headed.
The end is left unresolved, but I have rarely been so satisfied with an unresolved ending. This is probably because Up in the Air gave me enough to think about and was strongly enough rooted in reality that I could easily picture myself being into Bingham's shoes, which makes his decisions (or lack thereof, near the end) particularly captivating.
All in all, one of the best 2009 movies I have seen.
Rolling rankings:
1. Jackie Brown (#173)
2. Up in the Air (#182)
3. Avatar (#176)
4. Sherlock Holmes (#178)
5. Big Fan (#180)
6. The Cove (#177)
7. Julie and Julia (#175)
8. Kids (#179)
9. Extract (#181)
10. Angels & Demons (#174)
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