up in the air Directed by Jason Reitman | Written by Reitman and Sheldon Turner | With George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, and Jason Bateman
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In toting up my 2009 ballots, the first thing I noticed was that, by almost any measure, this has been an incredibly crummy year for movies. The reason isn’t hard to figure out: when the recession began in late 2007, funding for indie projects began to dry up, and the bad economy only accelerated the trend of big studios shutting down their specialty divisions, which have generally produced their more intelligent and adventurous releases. So even more than usual, the American movie market has been dominated by big, dumb entertainments aimed at subliterate teenagers. Perversely, as studios gave us less value their numbers improved from 2008: the recession has been great for box office because, even at $11 a ticket, a movie is still one of the cheapest nights out. So when good, smart people bite into Up in the Air and find out it’s a baloney sandwich, a fair number of them are going to be grateful it’s not a shit sandwich.
Of course, even Slumdog Millionaire—a British production with no stars—was too far-out for the major studios, who expect their high-grossing and well-reviewed product to be treated with greater respect than it got last year. Both WALL-E (worldwide gross: $521 million) and The Dark Knight ($1 billion) were nudged out of the Best Picture nominations by Slumdog and four other small pictures (Milk, The Reader, Frost/Nixon, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). As a result, the voting process has been drastically revised this year. The number of nominees has been doubled, from five to ten, so there’s less chance of a top grosser getting knocked out of the running. And Academy voters, instead of choosing a single movie, will submit a ranked list of all ten nominees, to prevent the winner being chosen by a plurality. No matter how passionate one might feel toward a particular nominee, he’ll be casting at least a fraction of his vote for . . . Up in the Air.
But Up in the Air isn’t really about these people—they’re just the topical garnish for a modern Cary Grant movie. The center of the story is Clooney’s graying cool-cat bachelor, who sings the praises of his jet-set existence and moonlights as a motivational speaker, advising people to minimize their personal attachments. Life is good when you have no family, and every meal goes on the expense account, and every hotel bar offers the promise of Vera Farmiga, playing another jaded frequent flier, who’s eager to compare platinum credit cards with you, come up to your room, and sashay around wearing nothing but your necktie knotted around her first-class hips. All others fly coach.
