Not only does Bingham feel, with some evidence on his side, that he is a humane, compassionate executioner, he also loves the soothing predictability that goes with high-end business travel. For Bingham is a very happy camper, and convincingly so. If you were to tell this consummate business traveler that he was going to be in a story that did anything but extol his lifestyle he’d think you were hallucinating. We see these people because “Up in the Air’s” protagonist Ryan Bingham is a corporate hit man who flies around the country firing people for companies who are too timid to do it themselves. It turned out to be a splendid choice, acknowledging the current economic realities without belaboring or trivializing them.
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Reitman nervily opted to give those roles to non-actors who had recently been terminated in real life, asking them to say what they’d said - or what they wished they’d said - when the ax fell. The film’s other risky choice involved opening the film with an impeccably chosen gallery of aggrieved people, all of whom have just been fired. It also helps create the film’s wonderful air of inclusion, the feeling that we can all happily share in the experience that’s about to unfold. It plays a hip-hop Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings version of Woody Guthrie’s venerable “This Land Is Your Land” over a variety of aerial shots of American landscapes, an offbeat and striking choice that says the things you are about to see are going to shake up your sense of the familiar. “This is the most personal film I’ve ever made,” Reitman has said, and what that means is that “Up in the Air” has been constructed with an underlying warmth and concern about character and an accompanying understanding of what’s of value in life, of what it means to be human in all senses of the word.īefore we even meet our protagonist, “Up in the Air” makes a pair of inspired choices. When one of his characters says, “life is better with company,” we can sense it comes from the heart. More than that, as Reitman himself has said, in the six years he worked on the script, the filmmaker married, had a child, and changed and matured as a person.
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Reitman’s previous film as a writer-director was the expertly done “Thank You for Smoking” (he also directed Diablo Cody’s “Juno” script), but “Up in the Air,” co-written by Sheldon Turner, is a step forward - both in the way it gets the very best out of actors and in its ability to make things funny without sacrificing honesty and intelligence. This film does all that and never seems to break a sweat.Ĭredit for this coup goes to writer-director Jason Reitman, who made Walter Kirn’s novel his own, using it as the jumping off point for a bittersweet look at the life and times of a happy road warrior, beautifully played by George Clooney, who willingly spends so much of his life on airplanes that he’s not exaggerating when he says “to know me you have to fly with me.” Not just in its casual and apparently effortless excellence, but in its ability to blend entertainment and insight, comedy and poignancy, even drama and reality, things that are difficult by themselves but a whole lot harder in combination.