Up In The Air

When you live above the clouds, the forecast is always sunny. So that's where George Clooney's Up in the Air hero chooses to exist, in a mile-high club accessed by frequent-flyer platinum cards. As a means to this lifestyle, he soothingly executes mass layoffs for cubicle farms, confiscating the key-cards of the newly fired on their way out the door. The movie opens with his bird's-eye view of the American plains, set to a Sharon Jones cover of "This Land Is Your Land," but this land isn't your land, and it isn't my land—it's his land, and he stays above it. "We are here to make limbo tolerable," he tells his protégée (Anna Kendrick), but he loves limbo and is comforted by the way all airports look the same, offering no reminders that he's in Wichita or St. Louis. Why would he join the poor saps who commit to something when he knows exactly how that ends? But Up in the Air is ultimately a warning about what happens when you refuse to settle—it's a heartwarming movie with an unbelievably sad movie struggling to get out. For a while, however, it disguises its melancholy. Clooney, whose silky veneer has rarely been put through such a workout, moves through airport security checks with the smooth pirouettes of a soft-shoe hoofer, and puts the same spin on his lines. "That was improvising," he smiles when his luxury-suite lover (Vera Farmiga) applauds him for "how you burritoed me in the sofa cushions." It doesn't sound like improvising. That sort of pillow talk marks the movie as a product of director Jason Reitman, who now seems permanently attached to pictures (Thank You for Smoking, Juno) in which the dialogue has the inverse ring of old-time brassy Hollywood repartee: Instead of sounding both carefully written and shot off the cuff, it clangs like a first draft that's trying too hard.

Despite the obnoxiousness of such lines, the movie often dances in places other studio pictures can't reach. Clooney takes Kendrick, an eager little gerbil of a Cornell graduate, along for an itinerary of firings, and Reitman paints a white-collar world where the glass-walled protection from the cold outside is melting with the economy. (Clooney reassures his aide that the downsized workers never actually hurt themselves, and she asks if he ever follows up: "Noooooo," he drawls. "Nothing good can come of that.") The journey ends where it must: Detroit. But first there's an idyll in Miami—with the insight that conferences are sleep-away camp for grown-ups—and then a wedding date that includes the powerful fantasy of showing another adult what you knew and saw and felt when you were 17. But that, too, is an illusion for easier times.

Up in the Air is a very good movie (I'd happily watch it again), but it wants to be a better one. The better movie it wants to be is Great World of Sound, an unjustly overlooked indie from 2007 that also followed a pair of exploitative business travelers sifting through the ruins of the American dream. That film knew exactly what it wanted to say about the resilience of the overlooked and unemployed—no matter what, they believed it was still their land. Up in the Air doesn't reach that destination. Instead, it's this decade's Jerry Maguire. Which isn't bad, but it's settling. R.

opens Friday at Lloyd Center.

WWeek 2015