Up in the Air

Grade: A

Uncompromising.

There’s nothing more professionally agonizing than laying someone off from work. That said, I’ve discovered I’m quite good at it. Hidden talent, so to speak. I get through it by convincing myself they’d rather hear the news from someone who gives a shit than from someone who doesn’t. I also find a klonopin an hour before and many glasses of wine after also help. The hardest part is acknowledging – no matter how stressful, sad, or upsetting it may be, no matter how many sleepless nights it may take in preparation – it’s not about you. Not even a little.

George Clooney spends his life on airplanes. His life goal is to join the elite 10 million mile frequent flier club. His check-ins at airports and hotels is masterful. His methodology toward getting through security is a thing of beauty. He fires people for a living. From the sky he looks down on America, from Kansas City to Detroit, New York to San Francisco, Omaha to Miami, St. Louis to Las Vegas. The landscapes are all different, but the heartache he executes is universal. We are one America in a devastating economy. Disciplined, systematic, businesslike, almost ritualistic, he is neither unsympathetic nor heartless. Merely disconnected. Just the way he likes it.

Clooney is ideally cast as the charmer with a cynical veneer that ever so slowly begins to crumble. There are no sweeping revelatory moments, few grand gestures and none that result in a romantic Hollywood pay-off, simply a man who comes to realize his isolationist philosophy has resulted in a life empty and alone. Subtly heartbreaking, a Clooney smirk is suddenly transformed into quite the devastating thing.

Stylized, crisp, caustic and unapologetically cool, writer/director Jason Reitman unflinchingly delivers the non-feel-good film of the year. Often bitingly and brutally funny, with dialogue Mamet would kill for, not since “American Beauty” has a film captured the longing of a life and a culture so perilously off track.

As a love interest with a crackling cynicism all her own, Vera Farminga is completely appealing, thoroughly non-plussed, and happily non-committal. While the romance initially feels rushed and underdeveloped, the mushy middle of an otherwise completely baked cake, a sudden turn toward steely hardness catches one off guard and pierces Clooney’s thawing heart. And ours. Anna Kendrick plays the upstart up-and-comer with a plan to contain costs by firing people remotely, initially coldly pragmatic about the insult she plans to add to individual injury until she begins firing people herself – a traumatic scene in which she fires a company man via webcam becomes truly haunting when she finally and reluctantly crosses his name off a very long list of names to follow.

Small acts of tenderness play out in quietly dignified ways, desperation never quite percolates out from underneath the surface. Sentimentality be damned, the film bravely remains true to a man who lives thousands of feet above the earth, never really connected to himself or anyone around him. The tragedy is that he knows it and, while he helps others find redemption, he never quite finds it for himself.

“What’s the point?” a brother-in-law-to-be asks a stubbornly shut down Clooney. “There is no point,” he is told, “I guess life is just better when you have a co-pilot.”

A lesson too late learned.

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1193138/