Running on fumes

Director Jason Reitman - hot off the success of his first two features, Thank You for Smoking (2006) and Juno (2007) - continues in a similarly eccentric and superficial vein with his adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel Up in the Air.

The plot centers on Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a roving hatchet man who spends the vast majority of his life flying from city to city administering employee layoffs. As bleak as this sounds, Bingham adores his peculiar existence and has distilled his personal philosophy (the fewer emotional attachments and commitments, the better) into an analogy, "What's in your backpack?", that he promotes in a series of motivational speeches.

Complications set in when a young, ambitious coworker, Natalie Keener (a lifeless Anna Kendrick), sells Bingham's boss (Jason Bateman) on the notion of conducting layoffs remotely, a move that eliminates Bingham's role in the company in one fell swoop. Bingham and Keener take to the road (or rather, the skies) for one final circuit of the country so Bingham can show her the ins and outs of handling the victims of downsizing and outsourcing. Along the way, Keener gets dumped via text message, and Bingham's previously casual relationship with a fellow frequent flyer (Vera Farmiga) threatens to evolve into something more meaningful.

Clooney and Bateman are solid and charismatic as usual, though lacking something in the way of conviction. Perhaps they were inspired, as it were, by the film's obsession with ennui. Kendrick's one-dimensional turn as a cartoon shrew is a low point in the production, a blemish contrasted nicely by Farmiga's luminous and organic performance as the love interest.

Reitman's crew is technically proficient, even gifted (in the case of editor Dana E. Glauberman), though Rolfe Kent's score is irritatingly quirky. Described by the director as something like an additional character in the film, the soundtrack is innocuous at best and intermittently distracting. Rather than adding to the production, it detracts, like an excessively gaudy frame on a sketch done in pastels.

Despite its oh-so-precious indie look and feel, Up in the Air resorts to tried manipulative clichés whenever the premise begins to wear thin. And, considering how little the filmmaker evidently has to say, we're pretty well accosted with clichés from beginning to end. That's in addition to the endless, exhausting cleverness, a crime the director has been guilty of in his previous films as well. Even the subject of teen pregnancy (Juno) was handled by the director with decided glibness and incessant attempts at wit.

In Thank You for Smoking, Aaron Eckhart's Nick Naylor (a nice Dickensian name, that) was at least intended as a caricature of a PR man gifted at solipsistic wordplay, which is why that film is probably the most dramatically successful in Rietman's burgeoning oeuvre. His cinematic universe is peopled with smartasses who are too clever by half and not half as human as they need to be to come off as sympathetic.

If there are themes explored - however vaguely - in Up in the Air, they would appear to be the alienation of modern life and the transformative power of self-awareness. Ironically, our protagonist doesn't actually change. For all his earnest efforts to accept a new level of vulnerability in his life, Bingham ends up much the same as he was when we meet him: an emotionally immature, dime-store psychologist, comfortably persisting in a cocoon of perpetual travel. He doesn't learn anything significant or worthwhile about life over the course of the film's 109 minutes, and neither do we.  

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com