Since the moment the film premiered at Telluride back at the beginning of September, the buzz has been building and building on “Up in the Air,” director Jason Reitman’s follow-up to the Oscar nominated “Juno.” The film got mostly rave reviews, both there and at Toronto (although our correspondent was a little cooler on it than some), and is now a front runner in this year’s Oscar race. It showed at the London Film Festival on Sunday night, with Reitman and stars Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick in attendance. So, was it worth all the hype?
Hell. Yes. As far as this writer’s concerned, “Up in the Air” is one of the best movies to come out of the studio system in years, with career best work for stars Clooney and Farmiga, the emergence of a major new talent in Anna Kendrick, and confirmation that Jason Reitman is one of our most exciting young directors. It kicks off with one of Reitman’s now-trademark killer credit sequences, a selection of gorgeous aerial photography accompanied by a version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Our Land,” by Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings. Even the manner in which this is handled, with each name in the credits disappearing with a jazzy flourish, hints at the care and attention that has gone into every aspect of the film.
Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man employed to travel the country, firing people on behalf of their companies, and a man who loves his lifestyle. It’s the actor’s best work since “Michael Clayton,” and probably ever – an old fashioned charming movie star performance from the last great movie star, but one with hidden depths and vulnerabilities. Bingham is a man who hasn’t settled down, but it’s not because he doesn’t like people, but almost because he’s too good with them — there’s too many people to meet to become attached to anyone (like most great movie star performances, Clooney’s character doesn’t really have a backstory — there’s no failed marriage to explain his disconnection with people). He’s as light as a feather in the opening scenes, verging on smugness, but as the film progresses, he starts to realize he’s lacking something in his life that he didn’t know he was missing, and starts to grow a soul. It’s a masterful performance, and fully deserving of awards recognition.
The rest of the cast match Clooney blow-for-blow. Vera Farmiga is fiercely intelligent, steely, and spectacularly sexy as the female equivalent of Clooney’s character (“you, with a vagina,” as she puts it…) who he starts a long-distance fling with, while relative newcomer Anna Kendrick (“Twilight,” “Rocket Science”) smashes it, taking what, in lesser hands, could be an irritating, one-note character and fashions her into something fascinating — a Best Supporting Actress nominated is all but guaranteed (unless the politicking and campaigning goes sideways, you never know). The supporting cast are uniformly excellent as well – Danny McBride shows a range we haven’t seen from him before, Melanie Lynskey gives her second great performance of the year, and Reitman mascot JK Simmons has a wonderful one scene cameo [ed. I really concur with the kudos to Lynskey who is having a banner year].
It’s Jason Reitman who emerges as the film’s MVP. We’d read and liked the screenplay earlier in the year, credited to Reitman and Sheldon Turner (“The Longest Yard”), and the finished film more than does justice to it. Retroactively, it becomes clearer how much of the success of “Juno” is down to Reitman’s skill with actors and expert handling of tone, and he shows the same abilities here, but he’s also come on great guns as a visual director. Reteaming with “Juno” DP Eric Steelberg, the framing is impeccable, and it’s a beautifully lit picture, perfectly capturing the world of the professional traveler, airport terminals and strip-lit offices, without ever feeling austere.
For such a relatively young director (still only 32), he’s remarkably mature, and his work here seems almost effortless. The film never feels manipulative, unfolding at its own relaxed pace, and absorbs you into its melancholy world so gradually that you don’t notice, until the well-earned emotional payoff comes. When it did, we were really, genuinely floored – a deep, soulful sadness that’s stuck with us for days afterwards. And yet, miraculously, the movie’s not a downer, despite provoking difficult questions, and not giving any easy answers to them.
Not everyone will react in this way — Guy Lodge from In Contention, who was cooler on the film, phrased it brilliantly in his review by saying “It’s as hard to articulate personal disconnection as it is to explain why some art moves one on a gut level — everyone comes to a film with different personal baggage, so there’s no solid frame of reference to work with.” Neither Lodge or The Playlist’s editor-in-chief quite clicked with the movie, but this writer certainly did.
It’s not (quite) perfect — Rolfe Kent’s score is overly-jaunty and a little anonymous, and Reitman must be kicking himself over the casting of Zack Galifianakis in the opening scene: it’s not that he’s bad, but he was cast when he was a cult comedian, rather than the breakout star of the biggest R-rated comedy of all time, and his presence creates an expectation in an audience that doesn’t gel with the movie. But it’s as moving and strongly-voiced a film as any this year, and manages to be effective, and affecting, on both a personal and a political level, which is no mean feat. Between this and Pixar, maybe every film should have the word ‘up’ in the title?… [A]