jason reitman's UP IN THE AIR (2009)

this is the prestige film of the season? how curious. Up In The Air is an entirely pleasant, appealing movie -- precisely the sort of thing upper-middlebrow families are lucky to gobble up after a long morning opening Christmas presents -- but seems most notable as a do-over for Jason Reitman and his tonally boneheaded debut Thank You For Smoking. this one finds a similar ugly-corner-of-the-zeitgeist angle (job losses here instead of lobbyists) but drops the glib, look-at-me-i'm-a-satire-please-look-at-me attitude in favor of...well, histrionics, but competent and mostly well-intentioned ones. George Clooney could carry this sort of movie asleep on a foldout couch by now, but he turns it up when he needs to, and the rest of the cast -- i'd like to single out Anna Kendrick, but can't think of any specific reason, because it's just that kind of flick -- keeps game company. (seeing as how the cast of Juno made everyone mistake a good screenplay for a great one, we can say at least of Reitman that he is good with his performers.)

but what are we supposed to make of the thing? first there is the profession of firing people: is Clooney, able to travel around firing strangers face to face while feeling by all means terrific about himself, better than Kendrick, who wants to tele-sack people but ends up reacting too strongly to the horror of it all? that's certainly the vibe we get at points, but Up In The Air doesn't own this conflict, or the more egregious one it unleashes in its third act when Our Boy does a big 180 just to tug the heartstrings. (Reitman pulls back from this reversal, almost arbitrarily, but the damage is done.) is it weird that something should be so incongruous yet so predictable? perhaps not, but it pretty definitively casts Up In The Air out of the company of the year's better films. a friend wondered what a smarter filmmaker like Alexander Payne might have made of this material, and i agree: it's an entertaining story, interesting and probably worth telling, but there is nothing special in what's been done.