FILM
Up In The Air (15)
4/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Jason Reitman directs George Clooney in a story about a corporate hatchet man whose jetset lifestyle is destabilised by two women.
REVIEW
Loneliness gets a bad rap. Look at Eleanor Rigby. For decades, we've been mistaking that spunky scouse lass as a victim in need of a little help from some friends.
What's that about? So she picks up the rice at a church where a wedding has been. Maybe she's a member of Keep Britain Tidy, or the RSPB, or maybe she has the biggest collection of edible grass seeds in the Liverpool area and she just needs a handful more to win an Uncle Ben Platinum Card.
So she leaves her face in the jar by the door. I have a bowl on the bookshelf where I put spare change and no-one composes a haunting lament finger-pointing my solitude.
Or take Ryan Bingham. A transition executive. A downsizer. A hatchet man. Goes from city to city telling people their working lives with the firm are over. Not a pleasant task. But he's happy enough because he can do it with a degree of panache and professionalism and, besides, it means he spends his life on the move and never has to stay for too long in his drab flat in Omaha.
Who has a problem with that?
Hollywood Romcom, she has a problem with that. What a glowering picture of contrasts that broad presents (bossy and swanky and over made-up but also with a soft centre and a penchant for ribbon-tied endings). Holly has a problem with the singular in her movies. Holly has a problem with Ryan, who she sees as a binary star system without a partner to pluck at his gravity. Holly sees an absence, an imbalance, a lop-sided equation that needs another integer.
Holly sets about trying to fix him by grounding him, by introducing preppie newcomer Natalie Keener (keener by name...) who thinks that video-conferencing is the way to go, threatening Ryan's freebird life choices and making him think about things. About life and stuff.
But Ryan's happy enough. He lives in the air, lives on the move "like a shark", with his neat zip-up tie case and check-in choreography and his eye for a gap in the line. He likes little packs of nuts and clean sheets and the fetishistic routines of travel.
He's happy. He's doing OK. Let him alone. Baggage with no baggage. He doesn't need Holly to send in Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) with her matching ships-in-the-night outlook and her come-hither pencil skirts and her poker fan of rental car Gold Cards.
Director Jason Reitman tells a story for the age of austerity. Of redundancy, of sterile corporate affairs and wholesale disconnect.
He does it with some style - swish and witty - and most of all he makes it very grown-up. OK, so Holly hangs around (she's a spinster), interferes, presses her nose against the edit suite window, rapping frantically on the pane to get a look-in and Reitman, because he can't get on with his job for all this hullabaloo, makes noises to indicate that he understands the story arc Holly is shaping with her finger.
And he shows Holly the rushes - and we see Clooney and Farmiga in clinches, getting warm and fuzzy at his sister's wedding and doing the athletic coupling thing in hotel rooms - but, when Holly's back is turned, Reitman veers his own way. Just enough to show that he understands that life's more complicated than that and when the move turns to schmaltz it loses track of its dark, funny purpose.
Besides, leading man - George Clooney, effortlessly swave with his throat warbling baritone and his immaculate Windsor knots - has enough about him to make Ryan more than a two-dimensional sap, marching to the syncopated rhythm of the romcom drum.
Clooney brings to Ryan a tremble, a sense of melancholy far, far in the background that hesitantly edges forward, like a kid playing blind man's buff, strong enough to make its presence felt but timid enough to know its place.
So the film gets to pose questions - about the joys of home and family and barking dogs leaping up at returning masters - but the answer are not necessarily the ones Holly can sell on a one-sheet to the Mills and Booners back home.
This is a good, slight film with excellent performances throughout. Clooney wears his corporate exec like an Italian made three-piece. Farmiga is charming and warm and sophisticated and you can see why Clooney's bambi romancer would want to fetch up at the Marriott in Des Moines for another meddle in her minibar.
Anna Kendrick plays Natalie Keener with brio and heart. As the ramrod straight up-and-comer sent out on the road with Ryan for some experience, she dreams of carving a Natalie-shaped hole in the glass ceiling with the diamond on her ring finger. So her unravelling is broad and funny in a piece that tends, like an executive waiting room, to be tight, airless and understated.
I liked this movie a lot. I had a good time. There was me, Eleanor Rigby a couple of rows back, Akon by the fire escape and Bruce Banner knocking back the popcorn upfront. That was it. Loneliness frees up the neighbouring seat so you can set down your coat and there's no-one blabbing in your ear the whole time. About life and stuff.
