Film Review: Up in the Air (2009)
Cinema is an art form where subjective impressions and interpretations carry far more weight than exact parameters—a fortunate reality for distributors, who are unlikely to face the sort of recalls that plagued Toyota and its Prius models in early 2010. Yet one wonders whether the Croatian marketing department behind Up in the Air might have benefited from rather more precision in their labelling. For here is a film advertised as a romantic comedy that stubbornly refuses to occupy such generic territory, instead settling uncomfortably into the mould of a deadly serious existential drama.
Ryan Bingham, portrayed with characteristic smoothness by George Clooney, earns his crust in a profession as grim as it is peculiar: he is a "termination specialist," contracted by corporations to deliver redundancy notices to unwanted employees with the minimum of fuss and emotional fallout. The year is 2009, and with the global financial crisis still raging, Bingham's services are in considerable demand. He has logged millions of air miles traversing America, a permanent resident of airport lounges and anonymous hotel rooms, and he rather likes it that way. Romance, such as it is, consists of casual encounters with fellow frequent flyers like Alex (Vera Farmiga), a kindred spirit who treats intimacy with the same transactional detachment.
The narrative engine—or what passes for one—arrives in the form of Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), a young, ambitious colleague who devises a cost-cutting innovation: why dispatch Bingham across the country when terminations might be conducted just as efficiently via video link? Her proposal threatens not merely his livelihood but his entire sense of self.
Based on Walter Kirn's novel, the film arrives freighted with festival pedigree and Oscar ambitions, and therein lies part of its difficulty. The documentary interludes featuring genuine redundancy victims—tearful, broken individuals recounting their sacking in the midst of recession—lend the proceedings a social weight that sits oddly with the film's more crowd-pleasing instincts. Director Jason Reitman appears caught between two stools: the desire to make a pointed commentary on economic precarity, and the compulsion to deliver something palatable to Academy voters.
Where the picture truly falters, however, is in its periodic attempts to "sweeten" the material with moral instruction on the importance of love and family values. These moments feel not merely unearned but fundamentally dishonest, betraying the very alienation the film has so carefully constructed. Equally problematic is Kendrick's character, whose caricatured over-ambition wastes an otherwise talented performer—though one must concede that her presence provides the film's few genuinely watchable passages.
The direction is competent enough, the performances solid, and the ending partially unconventional. Yet these virtues cannot rescue Up in the Air from its fundamental predicament: it occupies a chasm between Hollywood illusion and the grim reality of the world its audience inhabits. It fails equally as comedy and as drama, neither delivering the catharsis of genuine insight nor the comfort of escapist entertainment.
RATING: 4/10
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