Muriel Award, Countdown to Best Picture: #10
Up in the Air [68 points/7 votes]
“After its premiere at last year’s Toronto Film Festival, the mad dash from media wags began to anoint Up in the Air as the film for our times: a time capsule of what it was like to be alive in the first turbulent year of the Obama administration. Latching upon the corporate climate of mass layoffs and smarmy, white collar career assassins boasting that this is their moment, pundits singled out the most obvious signposts within the film while essentially ignoring its larger purpose and cultural relevance. In other words, the inclination to celebrate Up in the Air for its timeliness was correct but for all the wrong reasons.
Up in the Air is a studio film staring glamorous movie stars about isolation and superficial relationships as a substitute for an actual life. It’s about successful, upwardly mobile professionals deluding themselves through routine and placebo-like substitutes meant to replace the comforts of home (“faux homey”) - the type of people who apply for special memberships that allow them to zip through life (and various queues) without actually stopping to acknowledge anyone and who work from handy scripts that reduce memories, possessions and loved ones to liabilities that metaphorically weigh us down. It’s hard to imagine even David Fincher’s upcoming film about Facebook will be able to capture the way technology allows us to create the illusion of human connection, reducing a person’s life to a series of brief status updates.
Here we have a film about a professional axe-man (of the non-History Channel variety) in one sense fighting against the disconnect of technology, as George Clooney’s Ryan Bingham argues that firing employees through a Skype-like Internet program lacks the soothing charm of his measured, in-person affirmations about using unemployment as an opportunity for the recently terminated (“never say fired”) to start their life over. Yet his entire life is built around a series of physical barriers and limitations that exist to prevent him from laying down roots anywhere or allowing anything or anyone to slow him down. Bingham is the king of the road and the only lasting connections he has is with Vera Farmiga’s Alex, a woman who by all appearances is as shark-like and emotionally vacant as he is. But what happens when a life lived between text messages and impersonal hotel room trysts isn’t enough, when you long for more than just a single-serving friend? And what do you do after you realize you’re a prisoner of the world you’ve spent a lifetime creating?
In the casting of Clooney we have the great marriage of actor and subject matter of the last few years. A dashing, graying fox known for his serial bachelorhood, Clooney allows us to view the material as biographical, projecting our interpretation of his persona onto the character in the same way Mickey Rourke did two years ago in The Wrestler. I don’t know how close the actor’s life truly is to the character, but Up in the Air understands the perception and embraces it. It exploits Clooney’s impenetrable charm and casual gravity and then posits the “ship in every port” philosophy as a lonely myth.
Up in the Air was one of the most celebrated films of the last year, but curiously, in certain circles, it was also one of the most ridiculed. Called everything from glib and condescending to a disposable bauble and pretty much everything in between, Up in the Air, like all of writer-director Jason Reitman’s films, maintains a gentle element of social conservatism which I believe rubs a segment of the Alt-Weekly crowd the wrong way. Ultimately, the film embraces the idea of family as a reward unto itself, lending support and giving us purpose at the times we are at our lowest. This isn’t the story of a an ivory tower elitist learning the plight of the common man, but rather of a careerist learning their are consequences of a lifetime spent pursuing a single-minded goal. Bingham may not envy the disposed masses who have loved ones to great them every morning in lieu of a paycheck but he does recognize, with slight melancholy, that it’s something he’ll never have.” - Andrew Dignan
