How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
With millions of people still texting HAITI to help the Red Cross, it's probably not the time for me to question well-meaning, but detached acts of humanism. Charity is charity; awareness is awareness. But shouldn't a movie about the recession do more than text RECESSION? Why do so many people consider "Up in the Air" to be the definitive, morally unimpeachable Recession Movie, as if it were produced by homeless people and filmed on translucent food stamps?
Many writers, Frank Rich included, have celebrated its use of context — celebrating the fact that director Jason Reitman hired St. Louis and Detroit's actual unemployed to play some of the people axed by Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) and his trainee (Anna Kendrick) in the movie. I'll admit, the physical presence of the economically victimized is pretty powerful. It's a touch of the real.
But it's only a touch. Each moment with the miserable is isolated in a sterile room and designed to produce reaction shots. Each encounter is just that — an encounter, brief and pre-packaged, about as affecting as cultural tourism. The unemployed pile up offscreen, unnamed, cut loose by the film itself, while Clooney and Co. continue to have the corporate angst adventures that the film is really about. One woman commits suicide, but we forget her face; her death is used, more or less, as a plot device. It feels as if the filmmakers had a community service requirement.
The film subsists on an elemental exchange: Sith-style Master and Apprentice confronting real people with crushing news. But as last year's amazing "The Messenger" demonstrated, the key to understanding this conflict is to follow those people into their homes and their lives. In "The Messenger," Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster are in the business of notifying next-of-kin about Iraq War casualties. Like Ryan, they're tasked with maintaining an excruciating level of levelheadedness. But when they falter, they meet these people — informally, outside protocol — for a second time (and a third, and a fourth). That's when we get the full picture: life doused in grief that a packet of organized material can't clean up. It captures the emotional and existential wasteland that "Up in the Air" detours around — the point at which the filmmakers, as critic J. Hoberman put it, have "peeked into the abyss and averted their eyes."
Of course, "The Messenger" is high drama, and "Up in the Air" is dark comedy; they're not expected to peer into the abyss with equal levels of intensity. We allow satire to maintain its distance. But the film still feels fake to me, fake like the indistinguishable indie-rock Reitman uses as salad dressing, Vera Farmiga's ass double, or a JetBlue blanket. It's not true to the situation (no, not The Situation) it repeatedly returns to. The film would rather spend time getting married with the American Family, like every other Hollywood comedy ever.
Maybe it has the right atmosphere, but I couldn't help wishing that the film had stayed — like Walter Kirn's 2001 novel — inside the fluorescent-lit mania of Ryan's "Airworld," rather than putting a toe in the real world. At least then the film would have given us more of a feel for corporate madness, which is nowadays — as Homer Simpson once described alcohol — "the cause of and solution to all of life's problems."
