Up in the Air

Up in the Air has great performances from George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick with a great supporting cast. It also has a good combination of emotion, comedy and drama which helps overcome the predictable elements in the third act.

Up In the Air Movie Review

I finally got around to seeing the soon to be Oscar nominated movie, Up In the Air today. A lot of critics are putting it on their lists for top movie of the year and I will have to agree with them. This is a very good movie. It's funny and witty and has some good dramatic moments at the end that really hit you in the stomach. It's one of those rare movies that is fun to watch and makes you think at the end.

The movie stars George Clooney as Ryan, his job is to travel around the country and fire people personally and hopefully tries to help them move on with their lives. It's an art form that Ryan has perfected over the years and he is really good at it. I will have to warn you not to watch this movie if you have just been fired, because the movie is littered with scenes of people getting fired. Most of the people react in an angry fashion and it's almost comical in way they show these montages. Then there are people that react with a sadness and desperation that really makes you feel their pain. Ryan explains that he spends some 300 plus days traveling and a miserable 43 days at home. Through his travels he gives speeches at different hotels about putting your life in a backpack and feeling that weight. Your different attachments in life weigh you down. So he believes in having no attachments.

Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga play Natalie and Alex in the movie and their characters provide a challenge to Ryan's way of life. Natalie is a young college graduate with big ideas that will change the way Ryan will do his job. Ryan is not happy about this and thus there is conflict between the two. Ryan's boss, played by Jason Bateman, pairs Natalie with Ryan so that Ryan can show her the ropes. Their totally different personalities and philosophies on life clash and these provides for most of the funny and witty dialogue of the movie. Ryan is an older man who is calm and full of confidence in his job and in his life. Natalie on the other hand is young, naïve, and looks unsure of what to do most of the time. Alex is another business room that Ryan meets on the road and has a fling with. During the course of the movie they keep in contact and hook up as much as possible. Natalie seems to be just like Ryan in life only in female form. Ryan enjoys being with her so much is seems that he is reconsidering his whole theory on not being attached to other people. Is it possible that Natalie and Alex can change his whole outlook on life? That's obviously where this movie is headed.

So what is this movie all about? It's about life. Pretty simple but yet very complicated. There are two philosophies on life presented in this movie. There is Ryan who believes that relationships are the heaviest objects you can put in your backpack. Relationships weigh you down in life. There's too much negotiations and compromise that you have to do. You can't be truly happy with all these attachments with other people. As he likes to say, if you are not moving you are dieing. In a way we can see he is right. Relationships can be hard; you have to work hard at it. It's a drag sometimes. The people you are the closest too end up hurting you the most. We've all felt this at sometime in our life. We see in Ryan's life that he has no close relationships. He has no girlfriends, he has no plans to ever marry or have children, he has no close friends, he hardly has a relationship with his two sisters, he fires dozens of people daily and feels nothing for them, and he seems just fine with that. Natalie on the other hand can't help but being attached to other people. She has fond dreams of being married someday and having children. In fact she believes her life is not complete without this. You also see this when she has to fire people. She can't help but feel very bad for these people and can't detach herself from the situation of seeing these peoples lives destroyed right in front of her.

So at the end of the movie you have to ask yourself, are attachments and relationships worth the effort. The answer I came to be is yes, they are. At the end of the day what keeps you going in life. Is it your possessions or is it the love of your family? For me nothing can compare to the love I get from my family and friends. It's unmeasureable.. As they say you can replace your possessions but you can't replace your loved ones. This philosophy is even more evident in this movie when you think about the people who are fired in this movie. They are devastated by this turn of events but they also realize that they couldn't get through it if it wasn't for their family. You can lose everything but as long as you have a family to go home to you can be happy, you can have hope for the future. Without these relationships you are alone and have no one to help you through the bad times. So I would think about your own life and be grateful for all the people in it.

Grade- B

Rated R- Lots of use of the F-word and other cuss words through out the movie, 2 seconds of nudity of Vera Farmiga, lots of sexual innuendo and vulgar talk between George Clooney and Vera Farmiga.

This film is about a man who fires people for a living. His world becomes upside down when his job is radically changed by a newly recruited young fresh graduate.

"Up in the Air" is a well made film. The plot focuses on character development and emotional changes of the characters. It is not easy to make characters interesting and memorable, but "Up in the Air" does just that. Both the characters of George Clooney and Anna Kendrick have strongly divergent attitudes and personalities, but they have great chemistry and change each other slowly but surely. How they radically shake each others core belief is engagingly told. I enjoyed watching "Up in the Air" a lot, as it tells an engaging story of self discovery.

I really liked the movie, it kind of invites you to bring your own wine. There's a lot of probing into modern life and relationships, and it's up to you what you take from the film and what you feel for each of the characters. I was quite grateful for having seen Reitman's Thank You For Smoking (2005) previously, because both movies are really arch in the way they set up people in thoroughly pariah job roles and then get you to warm to them. So it didn't really come as a shock to see Clooney as an HR consultant (Ryan Bingham) whose job is to fire people in redundancy exercises where the management are too yeller, instead it rated an amused and knowing eyebrow raise.

Although a lot of the movie concerns the workplace, the disconnect between the interests of corporates and the interests of society (a link that was present historically in America, but which has been irrevocably decoupled), and how to work in that environment, the interest for me was more to do with relationships. From my male perspective there are some fairly poisonous insights into the female mind (though it may be unfair to generalise), the young Cornell grad Natalie Keener (played by Anna Kendrick) talks about her preconceptions of the man she will meet, the kind of name he will have, apparently the only thing he will love more than her is their "golden lab". The slightly older perspective from Alex Goran (played by Vera Farmiga) is that the man should be taller, should earn more, and come from a good family. To go with the aeronautical theme of the movie, the theatre should have provided some sick bags.

The main theme is, for me, pure Frank Borzage, it's about earning the right to love and be loved. In common with 80 years ago when those movies were being made, it's an onus that only weighs upon the male of the species, which makes the film a little hackneyed.

My favourite ambiguity of the film would have to be the backpack lectures that Bingham (Clooney) gives. He has a whole metaphor about everything in your life, the people, the trinkets, all the stuff you can collect, being in a backpack and weighing you down. He says that people aren't swans, they're not meant to be together forever, that they're actually sharks, who have to keep swimming continually, weighed down by nothing. I think there's an element of truth to both poles, I can see both arguments. I just love going to a Hollywood movie and not having an opinion shoved down my throat.

I had a slight problem regarding the level of realism in the film, I felt that the air-commuter lifestyle that was being shown was over-slicked, like I was watching something of a feather with The Consequences Of Love (or Giulia Doesn't Sleep At Night, two of the great modern hyper-stylised films from Italy). Nothing wrong with stylisation, except that I think Jason was trying to go for a film that had a lot of resonance with Recession America. I felt it was awkward to introduce real-life folks at the end, and also realistic looking termination assessments (or whatever they're called when you can someone), when the actors such as Clooney and Vera Farmiga were just so damned suave, as if from a different universe.

And this is to Claire.

We are drawn in by interesting, unique storyline and smart satirizations. About a man whose unique job is to fly around the country to inform people that they are fired. He meets a young ambitious woman that joins his company and who wants to change the system. Her ideas clash with his personal lifestyle choices.

What the movie really is about is lifestyle choices, and relationship choices, choosing independence and freedom versus commitment and well established interpersonal relationships. By taking a definitive stance the movie provides interesting commentary on those that for whatever reason (not necessarily for work) don't stay put.

A Monotone mood is established, that gave a bland aspect as though nothing substantial was happening. Part of the story took a dull meandering at times, however there were unconventional plot twists that made something that was seemingly Hollywood predictable not that way at all. And it was still interesting and entertaining to watch the contemporary witticisms.

The two main characters, although not the most true to life characters ever created, were brilliant satires of people we all know. We are all too familiar with the fiercely independent, non-committal, cockily at ease bachelor and we have also come across the, sharp, type A, ivy league know it all yet with an obvious naivety especially shown with her declaration of the specific laundry list of traits that her partner must have.

There were also some smart satirical illustrations of contemporary times in business, relationships, how people interact and the recession. For example the use of the smart phones in the new techno/relationship world is not simply put in as a momentum mechanism but is used as a symbol to satirize contemporary society.

It is not so much Clooney's acting that is a marvel as the casting, which was perfect. By being so spot on by choosing someone on the cusp of getting a little older yet with plenty of playful, youthful vigor we sense the conflict and the melancholy.