Up in the Air

Co-writer/Director: Jason Reitman
Starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick
Rating: 5 stars (of five)

This is the best new movie I’ve seen this year. Like Everybody’s Fine, also opening today, it’s a movie that grapples with relationships and has as its greatest strength a really, really talented cast. But where the other movie fails (weaker writing, rote storytelling) this movie goddamn soars. The quality of this film is sometimes shocking, enough to take you out of the movie so you sit there in your seat marveling at the nuanced, note-perfect performances before you.

George Clooney stars as a consultant who flies around the country (300 days on the road per year) and performs layoffs for cowardly employers. In the movie’s opening scenes he introduces us to his life, a hermetically sealed world in which home is the antiseptic, impersonal void of airports, in which relationships are defined entirely by the loyalty points and platinum member cards he earns as a frequent flyer.

Needless to say, complications ensue, as simultaneous threats to his jet-setting work life and to his “don’t need no one” emotional life. How he grapples with both, and who he becomes by the end of the film comprise the journey that director Jason Reitman so flawlessly lays out for us.

Clooney is one of the most reliable names in Hollywood. If his name is on a picture, as star or as director, you are guaranteed a good time. Now, you might be able to figure out in advance that you’re not the type of person who enjoys an Ocean’s 11/12/13, but that’s no fault of the filmmakers — if you do enjoy films of that type, then they’ll give you one of the most enjoyable such films you’ve seen in ages. While Clooney does the Hollywood splashes every two or three outings to maintain his bankability, it’s what he does with the star cred that matters: From directing Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night and Good Luck to starring in Syriana, O Brother Where Art Thou or The Men Who Stare at Goats, you get your goddamn money’s worth from this guy.

And he’s not the one to watch here. His two key costars are relative unknowns. As the perky business school sprite making his work life difficult, Anna Kendrick is fantastic, starting out as a stereotypical buttoned-down business geek whose character fleshes out and grows before our eyes (to a degree that the film didn’t “need,” but was so wise to pursue). Apparently she has a bit part in the big-deal sexless vampire-porn movie series that all the teenage girls and strange middle-age soccer moms are all excited about, but still, that ain’t exactly where you go to prove your acting chops. Apparently this film is, because she’s dynamite.

Yet she compares to the film’s real find, Vera Farmiga, who plays Alex, Clooney’s … well, you’d call her a “romantic interest” if Clooney’s character weren’t so shut off from such tender concepts as romance. She’s his equal, a hard-travelin’ babe who’s been there, done that (twice!) and is just as happy as George to meet up at new destinations for a no-strings fuck. She’s just amazing, this actress, and though she’s done a couple big things (Scorcese’s The Departed), she’s still fairly unknown, for now. Watch her in this, get in on the bottom floor. Remember how it was to watch Cate Blanchett act before you became a little jaded and said, “There goes Cate Blanchett, being unbelievably fantastic again”? This is like that. Her performance is funny, bold, multilayered, sexy as all hell, sensitive and captivating. If all you watch is her scenes, your ten-dollar ticket price is still cheap.

Don’t get me wrong — this is not a “wild” film. The sun will not melt the Earth, the dead will not rise, and no teenager will screw a freshly baked pie. The joy here is that, while these characters all live fairly uncommon lives, their problems and reactions all feel real. Hell, the three of them having cocktails in a hotel lounge and lazily discussing their romantic ideals is more compelling cinema than pretty much anything I’ve seen this year. And the miracle of that scene, when you get to it, is it’s between the two women you’ve never heard of. All Mr. Big Shot Star George Clooney contributes is well-modulated reaction shots, and these two actresses you’ve barely heard of just go, and George lets ‘em. Fine, fine stuff.

Reitman, son of the guy who directed the immortal Ghostbusters and Stripes, gave the world Thank You for Smoking and Juno, two excellent movies whose asses Up in the Air successfully kicks. There’s an interesting short interview with him in the December Esquire, well worth a read (here, fourth slide), in which he compares his films (featuring a tobacco lobbyist, a smartass pregnant teen and an emotional zombie who fires people for a living) to his father’s thusly: “If you imagine my father and I each as musicians, my father wants to take your favorite song and play it better than you’ve ever heard it. I want to take a song that you hate and play it so well that you learn to like it.” I find it interesting, and a great description of the way his films take characters or situations that you wouldn’t expect to arouse your affections, only to make you fall in love with them.

I got more. I could go on about this one for another two thousand words (which usually only happens when Nicolas Cage movies make me insane with fury). But let’s leave it with this: George Clooney’s best romantic role used to be Out of Sight, with Jennifer Lopez. That film still has the best love scene in movie history, but it’s a star vehicle, a slightly over-the-top tale of gorgeous cops and roguishly handsome robbers, a hyperreal confection. Clooney dials that boyish smile and that devilish charm down to human proportions here, and with Vera Farmiga makes it more human, relatable, and real. The film takes his character from a comfortable, isolated existence and shakes him up with a great cast (watch the interaction with his sisters for another example of great, naturalistic acting) and manages a resolution that feels right without being predictable or pat.

Do you realize that in the time it took you to read this review, you could’ve been halfway to the theater? Get going, already. Thank me in a couple hours.