Up in the Air
Whatever else I have to say about it, Up in the Air successfully distracted me from an offensive movie-going environment — the theater reeked of what I can only describe as bum stench. You board an empty subway car at the height of rush hour, not pausing in your triumph to wonder why every seat is available, and it is this exact odor that hits your nostrils just as the doors close. It’s always some goddamn thing at the Pavilion: the heat or the AC isn’t on, the roof is leaking, it stinks…pull it together, guys.
And speaking of spoiled things…
The movie itself did not stink; the first half is fantastic, especially Anna Kendrick as the aptly named Natalie Keener. Then it loses its nerve and retreats into a series of dutiful — and tritely arrived-at — insights that didn’t feel organic to the characters. Bingham trails off in the middle of a speech he’s wanted to give for ages, about a lifestyle he’s espoused for ages, to make a mad dash to Chicago and Alex? Didn’t buy it. Bingham more saddened than proud when he achieves the ten-million-mile mark? Didn’t buy it. (Partly because neither Clooney nor Sam Elliott sold it. I love the Cloon, and he’s got more range than he’s customarily given credit for, but this is a scripting issue; it didn’t seem like he knew quite how he should play it, and Elliott definitely didn’t know how to react to it. Weird scene.)
The audience doesn’t necessarily have to get on board with the idea that a married-to-the-job guy like Bingham is in fact perfectly content — but why couldn’t the movie try to? Why did it default to a Little Ryan, Happy At Last small-town-wedding montage, after forcing Bingham to redeem himself with his estranged family by talking the groom into going through with a commitment? Why did Alex have to have a family of her own — and why did the script have to approach that situation in such a binary way? I guessed she had a husband an hour before the reveal, because once Young MC showed up onscreen, I could tell that any nuances promised in the first act would have starved to death by the third. And sure enough, there’s Bingham, staring at the giant departures board.
It’s a disappointment; the movie isn’t bad, but I’d have liked it a lot better if it hadn’t decided halfway through to start reminding me every 20 frames that affirmatively choosing your work is a lie you tell yourself that doesn’t fool anyone else. When Reitman decided to take the “it’s too dark for Peoria” note from the dev execs, he sold out his actors — and, I suspect, Walter Kirn’s book. I haven’t read it, or any of Kirn’s fiction, but I’ve read his non-fiction, and he’s much more precise, and better able to manage human contradictions, than you’d think based on the writing here. (Kirn didn’t adapt it for the screen.)
It’s a well-paced and -contructed movie. Latter-half off notes aside, Reitman is an “it’s in the drums” guy who knows where the beats should go, and even when I didn’t love the (d)evolution of the characters, it moved right along. I don’t know that I’d nominate any of the performances except Kendrick’s; everyone’s very good (and Melanie Lynskey is underrated here, in a role that’s tough not to play to the punchline with), but I didn’t see Farmiga doing anything all that special, and Clooney is on the back foot for most of the last hour.
Go see it; while you’re watching it, it feels like an A-minus. It’s after you get home that you realize it gave up on itself.
Death Race 51, Sarah 7
Tags: Anna Kendrick dial-a-cliche George Clooney Jason Reitman Melanie Lynskey movies Oscars 2010 Death Race Sam Elliott Vera Farmiga Walter Kirn Young MC
Word from start to finish on this one. I left the theater going “that was okay, I guess” and then got progressively crankier as I thought about it. However inevitable, I hated they way they sold Alex down the cliche river. Of course she can’t be a woman who has happily chosen to be single and career-oriented; she must be a frustrated and compartmentalized soccer mom. Ugh. Also? Terrible first date movie. Oops.
Interesting. I too felt that it didn’t live up to the best of itself, and that it had a deeply conventional, even conservative, story pretending to be something else. But I didn’t regard the latter as a terrible flaw, and I was most bothered by the talking-heads scenes with fired people. Maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if I hadn’t known they were real people in that situation, but for me they saddled the movie with a level of distressing reality that its tone couldn’t include.
But there was 7-minute one stretch in the middle that I found absolutely beautiful, worthy of my all-time Great Movie Sequences list. The one where Clooney, Kendrick, and Farmiga sit down quietly in a hotel lobby and just talk. There’s a spark of something real and special going on there, and it’s in the writing, the directing, and the acting of all three actors — but especially Farmiga, who I think is absolutely doing something “all that special” — I can’t imagine those lines coming to life that way with many other actresses.
Every time Kendrick was on the screen, I couldn’t help thinking to myself “I’ve worked with that girl in every job I’ve ever been in.” And Kendrick nailed it.
I tend to get overly hung-up on details that take me out of the story, and all I think about with this movie was a) they went to Northern Wisconsin – where these people grew up – and not one of them had a funny accent, and b) she FLEW from Milwaukee to Chicago? It’s 90 miles! Rent a car! I know it’s not called Down on the Road, but set it in Minnesota if the cold mid-mid is such a big deal. Otherwise: goodish movie, agree with your high points and low points.
Rinaldo identified what was, for me, the best scene of the movie, and also said what I was going to say about Farmiga. She did a beautiful job with that mini-monologue about how you look for different things in a partner as you grow older (even though the character’s third-act twist half-soured the scene in retrospect). Hers was my favorite of the trio of significant performances here. She hadn’t made much of an impression on me in The Departed, but I think that was the role’s fault. A couple years after I had seen it, I could hardly remember there was a woman in it.
I can’t get behind the “performance of his career” notices for Clooney. He was both better and better-cast in Out Of Sight and Michael Clayton. I didn’t see buy him as someone who would be outstanding in that particular job. I would want someone more “anonymous” for that, more of a Spacey or Giamatti. Getting fired by someone I’d never seen before who looked like George Clooney, and who comes off as self-satisfied as GC always does (I like him, but he emanates more self-satisfaction than any actor I can actually watch, and it can curdle into smugness at worst), would make me even angrier/sadder/more prone to blowing up.
As for the movie itself, what can I say? Every year there’s some highly praised “little” movie (although usually with recognizable faces) that gets great reviews, and I go in feeling I should love it because it has this patina of integrity about it, and it’s about Real People and The Way We Live Now and all that. And I can usually see what it is that led to the praise, while still feeling it’s kind of a pallid little thing that buckles under all the praise being shoveled on it. A few years ago it was Lost In Translation, and before that it was Sideways, and a few years before that it was You Can Count On Me, and this year it’s this.
Crap. Sideways came later, didn’t it? I hereby save anyone the trouble of correcting me.
I really loved this movie. A lot of it is coming, I think, from the fact that I lived on the road for three years. I had no fixed address, I moved from one hotel to another, and I *was* that person at the airline security check. (That whole sequence had me howling – it’s funny ’cause it’s true.) I remember how much it sucked sometimes, so it didn’t feel like a leap for me that he was just conning himself into believing this was what was making him happy.
But then, I also have a hard time seeing the flaws in movies that I really engage with. I’d have to see it a couple more times to properly pick it apart.
@Rinaldo and Todd K – I totally agree with you about the scene in the hotel lobby, and about Farmiga in that scene. I also loved the wedding sequence, but then, I’m a great big romatic suck. :)
I loved the movie. The twist and all worked for me. About halfway through it was seeming to me a bit too fairytale–Clooney decides he wants someone in his life and BAM! there she is and it’s perfect and it’s really all just about making the choice. However the narrative had to accomplish it, I love that he made the choice and it still didn’t work out–because sometimes it doesn’t. See also: the older sister who was getting divorced.
Also, although I don’t know why her character decided to road trip to a family wedding with her fling, I thought Vera Farmiga was utterly charming.
I loved this movie, but then, I also lost my job about a week before seeing it, so it may have been a purely emotional gut reaction.
Also, I had just finished the book, which I loathed with a passion. I heard an interview with Kirn on NPR, which made it sound like an engaging read. It wasn’t. I felt like he couldn’t decide what sort of book he was writing–too melodramatic to work as a satire and too satirical to allow the reader to engage on an emotional level. The characters were shallow & poorly-conceived, the story goes on a bad drug trip around the halfway point and falls apart, and the ending was a ridiculous cop-out.
My hat is off to Sheldon Turner & Jason Reitman, the screenwriters, who turned this mess into a coherent film. They took the very basic plot concept and the names of some of the characters, fleshed them out, and chucked the rest. I agree with all of the issues Sars pointed out, but it was still such an improvement over the source material. I cheered when they were nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay.
I find myself curious about his non-fiction now. Was this a rare misstep for him, or am I the one missing something?
I actually loved this film, although there are flaws (I kept getting distracted by the fact that Clooney now officially has Old Man Neck, at least in the harsh lighting used in the multiple office scenes.) But perhaps that was a deliberate choice–his character is still acting the way he did ten years ago, and since he’s deliberately keeping his life the same, he doesn’t notice that old age is creeping up on him nonetheless.
It really didn’t bother me that Farmiga’s character had a family–I mean, it did, since she was cheating on them, but it was really amazing to see a woman acting the way a whole lot of men do and not get punished at the end. She doesn’t get divorced or found out or ratted on–in fact, she’s just going to keep doing what she’s doing, and if Clooney doesn’t like it, too bad.
And a huge shout out to Melanie Lynsky, whom I’ve adored since Heavenly Creatures. Here’s hoping there’s a role like Farmiga had in this film in her future.
I find myself curious about his non-fiction now. Was this a rare misstep for him, or am I the one missing something?
Again, I haven’t read his fiction, but his reviews and the semi-memoir (“semoir”?) Lost in the Meritocracy are tart and precise. I can see how he might not actually move across platforms all that well; I just haven’t read any of his fictional stuff.
I am so in agreement with you on this one.
The parts at the beginning that were really about his nomadic existence and about the disappearance of his job in the face of smug/sweet Kendrick, I really liked and thought were terribly effective.
But then, for me, it fell apart. I was much more interested in him as a guy who truly had adjusted to his life and liked his transient existence — as I believe some people who travel all the time really do — than I was in him as just another guy staring wistfully at people who live the simple life with their sweaters and their hugs, because secretly, he’s not quirky or different — he just wants the same goddamn things everybody else wants, which ISN’T THAT INTERESTING.
The wedding sequence and the Farmiga revelation played the same way for me: situations where I was meant to have sympathy for him and didn’t. Of course he can’t fix his relationship with his sisters in one weekend! Of course the woman he intentionally picked up as a meaningless hook-up doesn’t downshift instantly just because he does! It felt like this story of “poor Ryan, who realizes it is too late to change.” It’s not too late — he’s barely tried, for God’s sake, and now he’s apparently giving up, because he didn’t get everything he wanted in one try.
In the end, while I thought some of the performances were fantastic, I found the story to be, interestingly, rather Apatovian in some of its frustrations (though not at all in tone). Guy lives a selfish existence that seems to make him perfectly happy, suddenly decides he wants to be loved instead, instantly becomes a hero whose biggest problem is finding a woman who won’t be such a bitch. I just sense that there are directors and writers who find that arc much more satisfying than I do, and much more sympathetic.
I obviously have lower expectations than Sars! I was just so relieved they didn’t force a ‘happy ever after’ story between Clooney’s character and Alex. I was terrified ‘they’ would either hook him up with Natalie (ew) or have a totally life-changing into-the-sunset ending. I was prepared to see this as a guy who started to doubt his over-compensating about some of the downsides of his job (I also hated his bailing at the big conference) but who doesn’t turn his life around in an instant. Admittedly, that’s partly because his girlfriend isn’t seeing the same picture, so she saves him from that mistake.
I agree this could have been a better film – it could also have been much, much worse. Which Sars is obviously aware of, but I was so thankful to be spared that.
I don’t think the movie sold out at all. I felt that Ryan’s “turnaround” was just another big punch of cynicism, really. Does anyone think he COULD have turned around? Even if Alex had been single and willing? Anyone? Of course not. This is about a guy who suddenly turns a corner and suddenly comes face to face with his mortality, examines his life, and wonders if he’s done it all wrong. After all, no one else makes the choice he makes… do they? Quick, he’d better fix it. But the point is, he can’t. It’s much too late.
And Alex is an illustration of what would happen if he tried, because we don’t have time for a whole other movie to show him failing. She made the conventional choice, and got trapped in it. She is Ryan, if Ryan did indeed try to find the comfort of a relationship with another human being – desperately trying to hold on to independence, while still keeping up appearances on the relational insurance policy. And I rather liked that they chose a female character – as Jen S. says, it’s nice to see a woman do this for a change, without the usual moralising. They could as easily have done it using some work bud of Ryan’s making confessions, after all.
After all, no one else makes the choice he makes… do they? Quick, he’d better fix it. But the point is, he can’t. It’s much too late.
And Alex is an illustration of what would happen if he tried, because we don’t have time for a whole other movie to show him failing. She made the conventional choice, and got trapped in it.
Interesting take. And it could have been the intent; I didn’t get that from it.
I both liked and hated this movie. Loved Anna Kendrick in this and thought her interaction with Clooney was fantastic. However, I did have an urge to go home, drink an entire bottle of wine and cry. I found the whole thing really, really depressing although I seem to be the only one who has had that reaction.
I didn’t see the movie, although I find the various takes/reviews above interesting to consider.
I have to say though – in the end, will it ever really be too late for George Clooney? I’m guessing NOT. :)
I very much agree with your review. I loved the movie — to a point. I was extremely disappointed with what felt like the selling out of a character like Bingham. I found it intriguing that Bingham embraced his lifestyle, despite the fact that everyone was compelled to tell him why it was flawed. He had lofty (heh) goals, just like “regular” people do, and I was mighty peeved that the movie forced him to discover (believe?) that his choices and goals were somehow unworthy.
I couldn’t stop watching any of the actors, and loved the feel and pace and palette of the movie. I was more than thankful he didn’t get the girl in the end, but overall, it felt like he was punished for a lifestyle that didn’t follow conventional norms, and, even more heartbreakingly, that punishment came from within.
@ Lynne: I found the movie depressing, too, mostly because of what Clooney’s character’s responsibilities in his job were. That is, to gloss over the awful truth that people are losing their jobs in the middle of a terrible recession. The fact that people who actually lost their jobs were playing the packet recipients on-screen didn’t feel like the filmmakers were paying homage to everyone who has lost their job, or even an easy way for the filmmakers to get honest reaction shots during the firing scenes; it felt exploitative, and it’s really rubbed me the wrong way to hear critics calling this movie “a portrait of our times during the recession”, because the screenplay actually has no empathy for anyone who’s been a victim of the recession.
As for the movie itself, I liked all of the performances just fine, in particular Kendrick’s, and I agree with everyone who’s said that the first 1/3rd was the best part about it. Unlike you, Sars, I was willing to go along with the idea of Clooney’s character having a cathartic moment. What irked me, though, was that if the whole point of him having the moment towards the end was to snatch it away, why bother going through the setup of the middle 1/3rd at all? In that respect, I do agree that the better approach would have been to avoid it altogether.
“I found the story to be, interestingly, rather Apatovian”
Absolutely. For all his raunch, Apatow is a pretty conservative filmmaker, and from what I’ve read, Jason Reitman (aside from being, apparently, an enormous douche) is the same. There’s not a whole lot of empathy for the fired workers except insofar as they service the motivations of the main characters, and while I agree it was brave of the filmmakers to avoid the happy ending that could have been, the film’s overall message seemed to be that it’s an ending we all should be striving for anyway.
“However, I did have an urge to go home, drink an entire bottle of wine and cry. I found the whole thing really, really depressing although I seem to be the only one who has had that reaction.”
*raises hand* I just saw it this afternoon, and, conveniently, there is an LCBO (sorry – liquor store) right across the street from the theatre. I booted over there double-quick, lemme tell you.
Sars, I’m impressed that you guessed the twist that early on; I didn’t guess it until the shot of Alex’s front door. I think I was thinking “No single person would have a townhouse like that.” It did make me wonder why on earth Alex would have gone to the wedding; is lonely-guy-at-wedding nookie really that good? Note to self: attend more weddings.
[It did make me wonder why on earth Alex would have gone to the wedding]
Especially in the Facebook era, when photos of everything are on the internet within a day, and we all seem to be separated from each other’s network by no more than a few degrees (and the two locations are within driving distance, as someone noted). “Hey, I thought I saw your wife/sister-in-law/cousin in pictures of a wedding reception, as ‘Ryan’s date, Alex’.”
In light of what we learn later, Farmiga does play the hesitation nicely when he asks her.