Review // UP IN THE AIR - Come fly the asshole skies

Just being honest, I had it out for this movie before it even began. I really disliked Jason Reitman's last movie Juno and I've also come to dislike his public persona, based on some of the interviews I saw him do during last years awards season. He came off as pretty smug to me. I had a hunch that Up in the Air likely did not deserve awards season love (as meaningless and antithetical to actual quality as that may be) so the cocky way he wore his undeserved title of Voice of a Generation was starting to piss me off. I watched him on a panel with Tarantino, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow and he was practically argumentative with them. Are you fucking kidding me, guy? All three of those filmmakers are self-made icons. Cameron drove trucks and Tarantino worked in a video store. Something tells me Reitman's career came a little easier. Now that I've actually seen Up in the Air, I was right about it being undeserved of the hype, but it's not quite the flaming shit pile that I was hoping it would be. Turns out its just fairly dumb, a little insulting and mostly dull.

George Clooney plays a Clooney-ish character that is nearly impossible to sympathize with, and not just because he's played by George Clooney. His character (I don't remember his name) plays a professional... Firer? A Firing Agent? Downsizer? Elimnator? Basically he plays a guy who gets hired by companies to fire their employees for them. I'm sure this profession exists, but it struck me as a completely ridiculous one. Anyway, he travels around the country firing people for 320 days out of the year, reveling in his life on the road and giddily watching his air miles collect. He loves having no attachments, geographic or emotional, and his greatest ambition is to get some little VIP card from an airline for flying 10 million miles (basically the guy has the carbon footprint of a city-destroying Japanese monster, and of course this is never mentioned). All this and yet somehow the movie keeps positioning him as a figure of sympathy because his life is empty. However, throughout the movie we keep seeing snippets of a lecture he gives on how to empty your life of attachments, droning on about a backpack that we all carry and how its heavy blah blah blah. The guy has clearly made his choices, so why do I have to care? The movie never lets up on it's campaign to make you give a shit about him, employing Pitchfork-approved whisper-folk ballads in the quiet moments when Clooney isn't speaking about his life in writerly metaphors, letting you know that even though he may not yet know it, his life is lacking. Predictably, the man who extols the virtues of living with no attachments, wakes up and finds that he wants to be attached to something.

This kind of interplay between story and subtext, all spelled out in bold, unmistakable letters is indicative of the lack of subtlety at work. At one point, Clooney is saddled with a young hot-shot chick that has cozied up to their boss and is now looking to shake up their business practices. Her last name is Keener (ha). In another scene, Jason Bateman playing the head of the... people-firing-company gives a speech to his troops saying "the economy is fucked. America is in the shitter. This is our time to shine". There's never a moment where you're required to think about what is working behind the scenes of these peoples lives or make connections on your own. It's usually explained by Clooney himself in Don Draper-esque florid monologues. In fact, whenever Clooney speaks it's in profundities that made my eyes roll so violently they got whiplash.

So Clooney loves business travel and living out of a suitcase (what kind of masochist actually enjoys air travel post 9/11?) and in narration he waxes poetic on the joys of life on the road. But his high-flying existence is threatened when the aforementioned Keener devises a plan to save the people-firing-company tons of money and streamline their practices. Her plan, get this, is to use video chats to fire people instead of flying the likes of Clooney all over the country. This is her big idea. Wait, firing people over Skype would be cheaper? No fucking shit lady! But Clooney punches holes in her plan and so Bateman sends the two on the road so that he can show her the ropes in order to see if her genius solution can fit the practicalities of their business. At this point the movie acts like a duller version of a Buddy Cop movie with Clooney the seasoned pro rolling his eyes at everything from his young partners luggage choice to her first year psyche ideas on how to break incredibly bad news to total strangers.

This inter-generational Buddy Cop element is just one of several plot husks that are jumbled together to form Up in the Air. Another is the previously mentioned character study of a soulless corporate hatchet man discovering his own loneliness. Neither of these storylines is particularly interesting, so to spice things up, there is a Rom-Com thread that ties into both. Vera Farmiga plays the female version of Clooney, a sexy business exec who also loves flying the friendly skies, staying in hotels and racking up air miles. At one point she tells Clooney in her husky, mannish voice to think of her as "you, only with a vagina". It's a terrifying image. Clooney and Farmiga cross paths on the road and develop a fling that gets staged in various cities across the country, coordinating their schedules to meet for fuck sessions. When not screwing, the couple try to one-up each other with their knowledge of the road-warrior lifestyle, emptying our their wallets of VIP hotel passes and teasingly arguing over which car rental company has the best fleet. These two are the Adam and Eve of corporate America, rootless assholes whose identities are tied up with their meaningless jobs and who are actively and gleefully trying to destroy the notion of community in their quest to create a new frontier for the Individual. Almost every exchange between Clooney and female-Clooney is barely tolerable. In another predictable twist, Clooney begins to realize that Farmiga could be the "one", a woman worth filling his backpack up for.

The backpack is the metaphorical object at the heart of the lectures Clooney gives to bored conference rooms in hotels from Las Vegas to St. Louis. Apparently we all carry a metaphorical backpack that is filled with our attachments to our place in the world and the people in our lives, and this backpack hurts our metaphorical shoulders. Clooney is arguing that we should empty this backpack until it's so light that we barely feel it, and only then can we be truly content with ourselves. The argument, that we shouldn't be connected through community or love, is so absurd and ripe for a dramatic reversal that it tries your patience as soon as its introduced. I kept thinking, "does fictional Clooney really believe that the movie gods aren't going to strip him of this belief in the Third Act?" This inevitable reversal comes at one of his own backpack lectures no less. Reitman wisely decides against a Jimmy Stewart-esque oration on why he's been wrong to carry around an empty backpack. Instead, Clooney takes the stage and has a facial epiphany, realizing he's been wrong all along and then running off silently to chase down his love (more flying). Yeah, no shit you've been wrong. Duh! Clooney flies to Chicago and winds up on the doorstep of Farmiga, and in yet another completely predictable and un-shocking twist, she's married with a family, and we are again supposed sympathize with his sorrow and betrayal.

You know who we are not made to feel sympathy or sorrow for? All the people Clooney is firing in the movie. They are corporate cattle off to slaughter and Reitman makes token, empty gestures to them. Employing non-actors and shooting them in docu-style one-shots, these economic casualties are merely human props used to set the stage for Clooney's emotional awakening. The purpose of these scenes is not to make any sort of statement on corporate nihilism or explore the human toll of a broken economic system. Instead, these scenes are used to illustrate the terrible loneliness and disconnection of Clooney's character. How awful it must be for a man to be perpetually "up in the air" only touching down to shatter peoples lives. This I think is the movies greatest crime. The American economy is collapsing, greed has pushed the marketplace into untenable positions and it's the average, loyal employee who bears the cost. And yet the movie has almost nothing to say about this. How do you miss a target that big? When Clooney is told that one of the women his protege fired ended up killing herself, this news has no meaning beyond how it is absorbed by Clooney. The world is in economic turmoil, thousands of people are losing their jobs and yet this movie, a movie about a guy who fires people for a living, has nothing to say about it. In a backwards way, Up in the Air does become a definitive cultural statement on the worlds economic crisis, only not intentionally. It's self-absorption and focus on individual, rather than collective values is exactly the mindset that wrought the mess the world is now struggling to recover from.