Up in the Air (2009)

I don’t have much of a narrative to weave about this one, just a few thoughts I’d like to throw together here.

First of all, this movie was very sad. It was about sad people doing sad things in a sad world. George Clooney plays a guy who fires people for a living. That’s all he does—travel all around the country for 300 days a year firing people. Needless to say we are confronted with many questions of human connections, emotions, and what it means to be tied down.

That is the strength of Up in the Air—it is about very relevant current affairs. How many people have been laid off lately? How many people find themselves drifting through their days, wondering what aspects of their lives right now are going to last into tomorrow? I liked that Up in the Air didn’t flinch away from showing how horrible things can get for some people, economically and emotionally speaking.

As usual, I had some minor reservations, predominantly relating to the acting. To me George Clooney is always acting like George Clooney, and Up in the Air is certainly no exception to this rule. That’s fine and dandy if you like George Clooney, but I don’t really care for him too much. It’s not that he isn’t a good actor. I just kind of want to smack him for smirking so often. He did do a good job being a vulnerable George Clooney in this movie though. So that’s saying something.

I also had a problem with the disjunction between the real people who played those being laid off and the actors. Evidently the director, Jason Reitman, used non-actors who had recently been laid off to do some of the scenes between Clooney and his victims, and then sprinkled in some recognizable faces for certain scenes. I don’t know what these docu-esque moments were supposed to do, because this movie was no documentary. To me all this mixture did was highlight the falseness of the actors’ portrayals of the people who had been laid off. Probably not what the director was aiming for.

In spite of my reservations I can still very much see why this is already nominated for best picture. Up in the Air is highly relevant to current events with good performances and a refreshingly realistic view of the ways of the world. Pretty rare.