George Clooney with a new movie theater like we been met.

Review Up in the Air

Up in the Air has got genuine movie star wattage working on all cylinders. George Clooney plays a carefree, commitment-free corporate downsizer whose career, lived mostly on the road, is threatened when his company plans to replace his unique skills with an online program. Director and co-writer Jason Reitman follows up his Oscar-nominated work on Juno with this sharp, funny, perceptive comedy that represents his most mature and personal work to date. Commercial prospects for the winning holiday release are stellar, particularly for adult audiences looking for the kind of Class-A entertainment Up In The Air represents. For Clooney fans, it’s pure nirvana.

Ryan Bingham (Clooney) has a great job as a Career Transitional Counselor. For this he travels the country firing people for companies too chicken to do it themselves. He’s good at this and the occasional motivational speeches he gives preach the kind of non-commitment he lives his own life by. Spending 322 days a year in airports and colorless Hilton Hotels, he says he is only miserable the other 43 days he has to spend at home in Omaha. Striking up a casual sexual relationship with an attractive businesswoman, Alex (Vera Farmiga) who is clearly his counterpart (“think of yourself as me, only with a vagina,” he says at one point), life could not be better. Then his boss (Jason Bateman) tells us a brash young 23 year old executive has come up with a way to can people online, saving the company millions in travel and logistics. Sending this hotshot young woman, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), on the road with Ryan to learn how to do the business, Bateman gets more than he bargained for as the odd couple butt heads and both reveal unforeseen vulnerabilities. Along the way Natalie learns there’s more to life than being the smartest kid in class and Ryan learns his lifestyle may not be all that.

With Reitman’s and co-writer Sheldon Turner’s sparkling and sophisticated dialogue, this loose adaptation of Walter Kirn’s novel provides Clooney with his most winning and complex role in some time and he delivers with an outstanding, beautifully balanced portrayal of a man who is essentially lost somewhere in the skies and just doesn’t realize it. Kendrick could not be better—or more obnoxious at times—and lights up the screen. Farmiga is flat-out wonderful in a smartly written role. Other standouts include Danny McBride as Ryan’s future brother-in-law and Amy Morton as an older sister. Bateman is nicely subdued as the boss. Three actors who play employees losing their jobs, Zach Galifanakis, Steve Eastin and especially J.K. Simmons, are moving and first rate in the brief screen time they are given. Performers used in the scenes where people talk about being fired are actually real life case studies.

Essentially a story about connections—human and otherwise—Up In The Air is certain to draw hearty crowds and major award season attention. It deserves it and should stand up as one of 2009’s best pictures.

Distributor: Paramount
Directed: Jason Reitman
Screenplay: Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner
Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, JK Simmons, Danny McBride, Melanie Lynskey, Amy Morton, Steve Eastin and Zach Galifianakis
Producers: Daniel Dubiecki, Jeffrey Clifford, Ivan Reitman and Jason Reitman
Rating: TBD
Running time: 108 min.
Release date: December 4, 2009

Source: Boxoffice

Reviews 2: Up in the Air

Here are a few of the kinds of movies that I wish Hollywood made more often (like, you know, two or three times a year): a drama that connects to an audience because it taps, in a bold and immediate way, into the fears and anxieties of our time; a romantic comedy in which the dialogue pings with stylish wit and verve; a film that keeps surprising us because its characters keep surprising themselves. The beauty of Up in the Air is that it’s all those things at once. Adapted from Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, it’s a rare and sparkling gem of a movie, directed by Jason Reitman (Juno) with the polish of a master.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), the film’s debonair hero, is a new kind of no-sweat corporate executioner. Each day, he walks into a different office somewhere in the United States — Wichita, Detroit, St. Louis — and gets a list of employees who are about to be downsized. One by one, he sits opposite each of them, bringing them the bad news that their bosses are too weaselly to deliver personally. The victims are mostly hardworking middle managers who’ve been let go because of the economy. None of them ”deserves” to be fired, and so their reactions — terror, confusion, rage, despair — are notably intense, even as Ryan reassures them that opportunities await, that this is a beginning not an ending, and blah blah blah. (He’s also a part-time motivational speaker, pepping up the very sorts of people he fires.)

Elevated detachment is what Ryan is all about. I mean literally elevated, since most of what he does is fly around the country, hopping from one frictionless job to the next. He’s got a dozen passkeys to a dozen airport VIP lounges, boutique rent-a-car deals, and high-end cookie-cutter hotels, and the quick swipe of one of those cards expresses the joy he feels at living more or less his entire existence on the road. Ryan is a pure product of the new America, an addict for a life in which everything is systemized. He’s also hooked on frequent-flier miles, which he regards with nearly poetic aspiration (he’s out to collect a magically large number of them).

If Ryan had been played by anyone but George Clooney, we might not believe in (or like) him. But Clooney, with his effortless, cracklingly smart yet maybe slightly-too-polished charm, knows here, as he did in Michael Clayton, how to play a rogue who’s in danger of losing his soul yet holds on to it anyway. In Up in the Air, Clooney gives his most fully felt performance to date as a smooth hedonist who comes to realize that he may be drowning. This is movie-star acting of the sort that no one else today can bring off.

Ryan’s troubles begin when Natalie (Anna Kendrick), the new bottom-line chipmunk at his firm, comes up with the ”advanced” 
 notion of doing away with the traveling-
axman system so that the firings can instead take place over the Internet. Since Ryan the happy vagabond doesn’t want his lifestyle to change, he takes this young climber out on the road and shows her how downsizing with humanity is done. Kendrick is a fast-talking delight (she keeps revealing more layers), but there isn’t meant to be a romantic spark to their sparring. Ryan saves that for Alex, his sexy counterpart in corporate travel — and a role that finally gives Vera Farmiga the chance to show off the biting, sharp-eyed sensuality that makes her irresistible. She’s the homespun vixen next door. Clooney and Farmiga are fantastic together: Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell for the PowerPoint age.

The ”interviews” that Ryan does with the folks he fires give you a chill. They’re a vision of what’s going on in the country today, and Up in the Air is the rare film that does justice to economic desperation by expressing it with an honest populist embrace. At the same time, it’s a movie about how one man living inside the cocoon of an overly detached culture comes to see the error of his own detachment. Up in the Air is light and dark, hilarious and tragic, romantic and real. It’s everything that Hollywood has forgotten how to do; we’re blessed that Jason Reitman has remembered. A

Reviews 3: Up in the Air

A dramatic comedy of dislocation that, fittingly enough, never finds its moorings, Up in the Air sends George Clooney jetting about between the great aerial transport hubs of American flyover country, young ward in tow, as he tries to teach her the ropes of his grim business: firing employees whose bosses don’t have the guts to do it themselves. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, one of those smooth operators of the modern age who flits from airline courtesy lounge to hotel hospitality suite to office park conference rooms with nary a flicker of regret about the potentially real life he’s discarding in a flutter of accumulated bonus miles.

Life is clutter to Bingham, and the more one can get rid of it, the happier one is. His philosophy — expounded in occasional bleak hotel conference room seminars he gives on the metaphorical question, “What’s In Your Backpack?” (Answer? Too much stuff, empty it) — is a kind of shallow Buddhism perfectly calibrated for the age of reduced benefits, job insecurity and outsourcing. Delivering his speeches in a friendly cadence with that slight Clooney grin, not pacing the stage and shouting like some Tony Robbins wannabe, Bingham’s admonition to leave it all behind (family, houses, relationships) and jump clear into a world of constant travel and looking forward could definitely appeal to those eager middle managers in the audience. “Make no mistake,” Bingham says, “moving is living.”

Of course, Bingham’s purportedly joyful life is a lie, glossed as it is with so many engaging distractions. (A certain kind of travel-nerd viewer will thrill at the movie’s discussion of various car-rental brands, elite mileage programs, and the best ways for swiftly navigating airport security.) Director and co-writer Jason Reitman ensures that the film is filled with uncomfortably direct soliloquies from the newly fired, a litany of tired-eyed people pleading, “What am I going to do now?” These are the ghosts of Bingham’s life, the wrecked lives that he wants to dump behind him as so much extra clutter. Needless to say, they will come back to haunt him.

Based on Walter Kirn’s 2003 novel, Reitman and Sheldon Turner’s screenplay opens up the original story, mostly for the better. They add in Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a peppy little overachieving Stanford grad trying to get Bingham’s boss (played with particularly unctuous zeal by Jason Bateman) to ground all his traveling termination counselors and do everything via webcast. In a last-ditch attempt to hang on to his treasured (and suddenly fragile) lifestyle, Bingham ends up squiring Natalie on his rounds around the country, showing her the ropes. It’s a clever way to illustrate the grueling daily processes of Bingham’s job, into which Kirn rarely delved.

Along the way, Bingham fires up one more of his occasional, see-you-when-I-see-you romances, this time with a woman who appears to be his gender-opposite equal. Vera Farmiga plays Alex Goran, a fun, cynical, up-for-anything sort who just might be the coolest woman on the planet. Although their lives are supposedly compatible only in that neither wants any sort of weighing-down solidity or regularity, it’s clear — particularly in one exquisitely timed comic scene where the two counsel a newly heartbroken Natalie — that Bingham is quickly falling deeply in love with Alex. It’s an odd courtship, simultaneously carnal and chummy, but utterly affecting and quite possibly the best thing in the film.

Reitman tries mightily hard to update Kirn’s novel to an even more economically fragile time, bringing the haunting specter of unemployment and its attendant emotional devastation front and center. Where Up in the Air runs into problems is not in this attempt, or with any of its top-notch performers, but in how it tries to marry that bleakness with its sense of humor. There are many easy jokes here, and they don’t always jibe well with the recurrent spectacle of Bingham and Natalie’s interviewees getting their lives cut apart one after the other. The filmmakers’ desire to smooth the edges of their story is understandable. But in working overtime to show how these hard-bitten road warriors crack wise to make it through their day, they end up letting the audience off the hook as well.

Reviews 4: Up in the Air

For most people there’s no joy in sucking down recycled oxygen while hurtling above the clouds. The free drinks and freshly baked cookies in business might be nice. (I wouldn’t know.) For most of us, though, air travel largely invokes the indignities of the stockyard, complete with the crowding and pushing, the endlessly long lines, hovering handlers, carefully timed feedings, a faint communal reek and underlying whiff of peril. The skies rarely seem friendly anymore, but to Ryan Bingham, the corporate assassin played by George Clooney in the laugh-infused stealth tragedy “Up in the Air,” they’re so welcoming, he might as well be home.

And so he is. Like many high-altitude border crossers who sometimes seem alone in keeping the airlines aloft, those business types with the corrugated brows, juggling BlackBerrys and double-shot lattes, Bingham lives in between here and there, home and away. The difference is, he loves interstitial living, finds comfort and more in all the spaces associated with airports and airplanes or in what Walter Kirn, in his novel that inspired the film, calls Airworld. “To know me is to fly with me,” Bingham says in the film, like an airborne Descartes. It’s as if as a child he had heard — and heeded — the call of the female attendants for National Airlines who, in the gilded flying age, used to purr, “Fly Me.” Back when flying meant soaring.

That was then, this is now, and this is here, meaning the crash-and-burn-baby-burn America in which one man’s economic crisis is another’s golden opportunity. This is our moment, enthuses Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman, pitch perfect), the unctuous pragmatist for whom Bingham works if rarely sees in person. Some men hunt heads, others — like Bingham — lop them off. A “career transition” counselor, he crisscrosses the country firing employees whose bosses won’t pull the plug themselves. Racking up scalps and miles might seem like a tough way to make a living. Yet it suits Bingham, a solo act for whom no hotel room is too depressing or crowd too lonely, which makes him ripe for the dramatic picking.

The young director Jason Reitman initially takes a hard-sell approach to Bingham, putting the character — and of course Mr. Clooney — front, center and under flattering light, as if he were selling a luxury car or diamond watch, which in some ways he is. In fighting trim, Mr. Clooney looks suitably sleek, even when dressed in the generic business clothes he’s soon packing into a suitcase, a task that’s captured in a series of precisely framed, rapid shots. Expressive of both efficiency and a routinized existence, this sequence is itself an economic narrative device (one Mr. Reitman repeats). But it also comes across as glib, a shortcut to character, making it hard to know if it’s Bingham who’s the slick one here or Mr. Reitman.

The answer is both, though Mr. Reitman is working harder than it first appears and more than he did in either “Juno” or “Thank You for Smoking,” his only other features. The son of a funnyman (his father, the producer-director Ivan Reitman, helped bankroll this movie), the younger Mr. Reitman seems to have been weaned on screwball comedies — he likes women and teasing patter — and classic Hollywood is in his blood. “Up in the Air” is an assertively, and unapologetically, tidy package, from its use of romance to instill some drama into the narrative (the book introduces disease instead) and the mope-rock tunes that Mr. Reitman needlessly overuses. When you have Mr. Clooney and Vera Farmiga on camera, you don’t need some professional emoticon mewling away on the soundtrack.

Ms. Farmiga enters the picture, legs and intelligence flashing, just around the time you think that nothing much is going to happen with Bingham. (A crash? a terrorist strike?) As Alex, a fast-moving businesswoman, Ms. Farmiga bats around the double-entendres effortlessly and brings out real warmth and palpable vulnerability in her co-star. To watch them together — particularly during their later scenes, when they visit Bingham’s hometown — is to realize just how much alone time Mr. Clooney clocks in his movies. It says something about the dearth of strong female stars in American cinema that he hasn’t been this well matched with a woman since Jennifer Lopez in the 1998 caper film “Out of Sight.” (In the years since, Brad Pitt has been playing Rosalind Russell to Mr. Clooney’s Cary Grant in the “Ocean’s” movies.)

One of the pleasures of “Up in the Air” is that its actresses — including Anna Kendrick, who plays Bingham’s colleague Natalie — share the frame with Mr. Clooney as equals, not props. The ferocious Ms. Kendrick, her ponytail swinging like an ax, grabs every scene she’s in, which works for her go-getter (go-get-him) character, who is sent out on the road with Bingham as part of an efficiency campaign. She’s a monster for our times: a presumed human-resources expert who, having come of age in front of a computer, has no grasp of the human. By contrast Bingham, who fires people face to face with a small smile and pat speech, comes across as the good guy, though only if you forget what he does for a living.

Mr. Reitman successfully exploits the seeming disconnect between his star (whom we can’t help but like) and the character he plays (whom we want to like, simply because he’s played by Mr. Clooney), so much so that it takes some time for you to notice the approaching darkness. Mr. Reitman certainly hints at the trouble to come: however bright Mr. Clooney’s smile, there is something terribly off about Bingham’s blithe attitude both toward his own existential reality and his profession. Instructively, it is how Mr. Reitman circles around the character, showing how Bingham’s actions affect not just him, but also those around him — including the people he fires — that deepen the movie if not its peripatetic center.

There are different ways into “Up in the Air,” which can be viewed as a well-timed snapshot of an economically flailing America, appreciated as a study in terminal narcissism or dismissed as a sentimental testament to traditional coupling. A wedding subplot, for one, involving Bingham’s sisters (Melanie Lynskey and Amy Morton), which brings him closer to Alex, threatens to swamp the story in sentimentality. Yet to put too much stock in this detour (which also involves Danny McBride) is to flatten a film bristling with contradictions. Certainly you can fall for Bingham, maybe even shed a tear for him, though don’t get carried away (as he does) or mistake him for some kind of hero. The truer tragedy here, as the repeated images of fired men and women suggest, doesn’t belong to him.

“Up in the Air” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Adult language and partial female nudity if not (alas) male.

UP IN THE AIR

Opens on Friday nationwide.

Directed by Jason Reitman; written by Mr. Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn; director of photography, Eric Steelberg; edited by Dana E. Glauberman; music by Rolfe Kent; production designer, Steve Saklad; produced by Ivan Reitman, Jason Reitman, Daniel Dubiecki and Jeffrey Clifford; released by Paramount Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes.

WITH: George Clooney (Ryan Bingham), Vera Farmiga (Alex Goran), Anna Kendrick (Natalie Keener), Danny McBride (Jim Miller), Jason Bateman (Craig Gregory), Melanie Lynskey (Julie Bingham), Amy Morton (Kara Bingham), Sam Elliott (Maynard Finch), J. K. Simmons (Bob), Zach Galifianakis (Steve) and Chris Lowell (Kevin).