Up in the Air

Is everybody high? Perhaps it’s just that the film itself works like a blithe pharmaceutical. It turns out that, despite the gushings and mushings of a great many apparently sane people prostrate before its supposed majesty, Up in the Air is a barely serviceable, shallow piece of artless shit, saved from utter abasement by two excellent actresses, one or whom is probably, to my mind, the best one working in American cinema today. George Clooney probably cannot really be faulted for playing George Clooney. He’s a fucking movie star, isn’t he? But the filmmakers do us a disservice by bringing to bear just such a movie star in a film that desperately needs, you know, a guy. Vera Farmiga is, however, and despite a series of questionable career moves of late, seemingly capable of doing no wrong. Here, she effortlessly manifests a high-test femininity that one doesn’t encounter often enough in this world (though one encounter is, oddly, often one too many for those who cannot take the heat – which is essentially most of us): pure sexual magenta, a tectonic libidinal depth charge, distributing life-destroying circulatory coolant. Hers is the kind of sexual poise and inexhaustible je ne sais quoi that fucks up lives – destabilizing the deeply entrenched philosophies that go w/ them – and fucks ‘em up right proper (!). Perhaps worse than Up in the Air itself is the realization that I will be sitting through this shitty movie again, and again, and again so that I may submit before Vera Farmiga’s deafening skull-caving goddessery. Her character, Alex, is the only digestible apple in the bunch simply because she is the only one not possessed of illusions concerning the nature of the cutthroat world she sharks about in; the kind of person we should all be grateful to get the chance to be used by; a woman who will never need anything back from us. She’s doing the best she can to ride it out in style in a shitty world full of pithy Hallmark epigraphs that barely disguise the fact that nobody here ultimately gives a shit about anybody other than themselves, least of all the filmmakers (who do the most of anyone to demonstrate caring w/ a faux earnestness as bankrupt as the commodities market). The film’s apparent trump card – non-actors tricked into the film by classified adds asking recently fired out-of-work nobodies to appear in a documentary about termination in our current economic climate (which is not what this is!) – seriously backfires on it. These quickly clipped together talking heads, directly addressing the camera, who open the film proper and appear again later for some easy blues, make obvious director Jason Reitman’s total lack of perspective. His consequent attempts to make us care about George Clooney’s sexy ennui or dizzy princess Anna Kendrick’s growing realization (admittedly well wrought) that the world can be unfair and cruel are – built to ride as these trajectories are on the spare parts of real lives really sunk – a losing battle from the word go. As freelance corporate assassins who cavort about Anywhere Red State U.S.A., traveling first class, complaining about how their lives lack real form or meaning (or occasionally basking in it, as Clooney’s Ryan Bingham is wont to do, because the film wants to be edgy), they find themselves in need of a much darker, more savage film than the one they are in, which is basically as fluffy as the clouds at 30,000 feet. Spinning their curt workaday destruction of sad, desperate lives of indentured servitude as offerings of fresh, hopeful new beginnings for the recently downsized, they demand a considerable taxation on our investment as an audience. When Bingham decides that his “travel light” philosophy of life – which he pedals, in a manner which stretches expositional credulity, as a part-time prospective Tony Robins-style inspirational speaker doing an unfunny variation on George Carlin’s “stuff” rant – is no longer doing it for him, and goes off in search of love and approval from Alex, only to discover that she is not in fact real-life-available, this is hardly sufficient comeuppance. He deserves so much worse, and a nastier, more pissed-off movie to deserve it in. I mean: the guy got to fuck Vera Farmiga! Boo hoo! Bingham’s third act restoration is such horseshit that even Clooney can’t sell it w/ that shit-eating grin and go-get-‘em mien of his. That this visually blah film, which demands of its actors that they carry the whole thing, only to make that impossible for them when considered next to the catalogue of shit-out-of-luck faces from the crowd, expects us to enjoy it as a breezy, cunning entertainment, shows some serious fucking chutzpah. A chutzpah entirely missing from the lifeless execution of this risible little treat itself, which no amount of snappy cutting or dude-packing-his-shit montages is gonna save.