AWARDS:
NOMINATED: 82nd Annual Academy Awards: Best Picture
Best Actor: George Clooney
Best Supporting Actress: Vera Farmiga
Best Supporting Actress: Anna Kendrick
Best Director: Jason Reitman
Best Adapted Screenplay: Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner
REVIEW:
UP IN THE AIR concerns a blithe loner who lives in the skies, always traveling, never grounded for long. With no wife and no baggage beyond a black wheeled carry-on, he spends most of his time in the clouds. Any film that tells his story would have to be light on its feet, but the deftness and surety of Jason Reitman's latest work defy the law of gravity. Crisply funny and fleetly paced, it's in its quiet way one of the saddest things in the theaters all year. The sadness accrues bit by bit, beginning with an absolute downer of a subject - a corporate terminator-for-hire who wings around the country firing people - and ending, as it must, in an airport.
But despite a premise that augers loneliness and heartbreak, the film teases us into believing that something rosy might be waiting on arrival. As the plane sinks lower, things look up. Caught within this paradox, and wearing it like a fine Italian suit, is George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, dashing downsizer par excellence. The part requires an actor of enormous superficial charm; we have to like him enough not to want to kick him in the shins, even while he's jetting around the country dispensing pink slips. But it also requires a dark smear of melancholy, something heavy around the shoulders and worried around the eyes. Glib as he is, Ryan can't quite believe his own blarney. And that's pure Clooney.
It's also pure Reitman, whose THANK YOU FOR SMOKING starred Aaron Eckhart as a tobacco lobbyist forced to clarify (if not renounce) his own heartless values. Emotionally, UP IN THE AIR lands somewhere between SMOKING and the idiosyncratic, heartfelt JUNO, another look at characters keeping tabs on their priorities. Once again, Reitman the screenwriter gives Reitman the director an excuse to ponder the spaces between us and the ties that bind. Or don't.
Scattered throughout are plain-talking close-ups of folks being laid off, most of them played by non-actors dramatizing the moment - in real life - when they actually got canned. For them, the title doesn't suggest a preference for air travel or some existential lightness of being, unbearable or otherwise.
It means rootlessness and unpredictability in tough economic times. Reitman's film is a testament to them on their journey - and a portrait of Ryan on his. It soars. sfgate.com
