George Clooney as an actor is as prolific as he is talented, and has also proved himself as a producer and director. The downside of all this engagement is films like Up in the Air, which gives every indication that it is engaging with a serious contemporary topic, but in which Clooney is merely going through the motions, seeming to believe that his presence is enough to confer some sort of imprimatur of seriousness. It isn’t.
Having said this, Up in the Air has been nominated for six Oscars, including Clooney’s dialed-in performance for Best Actor in a Leading Role. As for the screenplay, it has already garnered BAFTA and Broadcast Film Critics Association awards, and while clearly picking up on a worthy subject at a time when it is particularly sensitive, seems riddled with rom-com cliches. Is all the critical praise simply because Up in the Air deals with the issue of people losing their jobs, and the fact that people make a living from inflicting this trauma on others?
This forms one of the plot stands in the film, but far from the most important one, and is certainly not enough to warrant all this critical adulation. What the film does with its serious topic is addressed in a dialogue between Clooney, who plays a “termination facilitator,” a person whose job it is to fire people, and his new partner, an idealistic Ivy League graduate played by Natalie Keener, who seems to be channeling a mix of Sandra Bullock and Anne Hathaway. One of the employees that she has fired tells her during the termination interview that she was planning to jump off a bridge. Keener asks Clooney whether it will happen. He says that people say all kinds of things in the stress of the moment; it means nothing. “Do you follow up on them?” she asks. “No,” he replies, you don’t really want to go there.
The problem with Up in the Air is just that: It doesn’t really want to go there. It wants to be a likable romantic comedy with a hard center, and while real interviews with people facing redundancy were included to give the film a documentary street cred, it’s all smothered in a sentimental sugary coating that ultimately deprives it of any real impact.
Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, is a man who has divested himself of all personal luggage in carrying out his emotionally draining but highly profitable work. Keener’s character, Anna Kendrick, can’t hack the harsh realities that Bingham lives with every day, and the price he pays is his isolation from real human connections. Then we discover, after meeting Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), another executive who spends much of her life flying from one state to another, that he is just another poor sap who wants to be loved, and whatever appeal he had as the soulless commuter excited by his air miles and hotel privileges goes up in smoke.
Up in the Air wants to be serious and it wants to be funny and it wants to be light and airy. Indeed it wants to be so many things that it seems at times to be almost schizophrenic. The only character who manages to chart a clear course through these choppy waters is love interest Alex Goran, who manages to be sympathetic as the worldly wise woman who plays the mating game with a harder edge than the boys. When Bingham discovers that she is in fact a more clear-headed version of himself, he seems happy enough to switch back to his old lifestyle, and nothing seems to have been won or lost in the encounter.
The film pushes toward a wide variety of topics, many of them interesting, but it fails to deliver on pretty much all of them. At any moment you can point to something good that is being done on screen, but unfortunately for Up in the Air, this is a film that is very much less than the sum of
its parts.
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