Up in the Air (Is Where My Lunch Is After Watching This Movie Which I Didn’t Like At All)

Slate’s Dennis Lim on Up in the Air:

The first film in history was an 1895 short by the Lumière brothers with the self-explanatory title Workers Leaving the Factory. In the years since, as if in deference to their function as a leisure activity, movies have been largely blind to the daily rituals of work and the meaning it has in our lives (unless the characters are, say, detectives or assassins). Documentaries are the exception, as are sporadic outliers like Mike Judge. There is a kind of bracing novelty when a big movie with a glamorous star so much as glances in the direction of the real working world, where people toil, lose jobs, and struggle for survival (and have done so since long before 2009).

Reitman is canny enough to understand this effect and cynical enough to exploit it vampirically by padding out his film with testimonials from actual unemployed people (obtained under false pretenses: He held casting calls for the newly terminated, claiming that he was making a documentary about unemployment, and coaxed his subjects to relive their dismissals on camera). But Up in the Air isn’t really about these authentic casualties of 21^st-century American capitalism or their fictional counterparts. The jobless ranks merely form the backdrop—and, worse yet, provide the fodder—for its hero’s rogue-charm offensive and redemptive epiphany.

Yeah.  I despised this film (just saw it last night), particularly its last third, when Reitman makes it abundantly clear that he has even less regard for the plight of the fired workers than their cruel overlords.  I love Clooney, don’t get me wrong, but can’t help but think what a better (and wholly different, granted) film this would have been if his jawline wouldn’t have been able to caulk in the significant cracks in his character’s psyche.

Filed under: Dennis Lim  film  George Clooney  Jason Reitman  Up in the Air