AIRLOCK
by
Les Phillips
Millions of American workers lost their jobs this year. But that is
of no account: we want to know whether George Clooney will find his
one true love. Jason Reitman's Up in the Air
has been billed as a "sardonic comedy about corporate America,"
but nothing in that characterization is accurate. The depiction of corporate
America is closer to documentary than comedy: Ryan Bingham (Clooney)
spends 300 days a year flying from city to city, from Hilton to Marriott
to Westin, from airport club lounge to airport club lounge. He fires
people, because their bosses don't have the guts to do the job. He fires
thousands of people face to face every year, with a practiced rap that
evades real discussion, lies to people about their severance packages
and future prospects, ignores and deflects their sorrow and rage. He
is an even bigger asshole than the corporate hack lobbyist in Thank
You For Smoking, which really was satire. The plot advances when Ryan's
corporation decides on an advanced, efficient method of employee disposal:
do it by teleconference! Why is this satire? If this isn't best practice
already, surely some company will start doing it very soon.
Up
in the Air would like to move past all this carnage and present
a conventional romantic tale -- how the organization man climbs out
of his soullessness, stops the compulsive travel, settles down, and
finds his heart. (He would of course continue to fire thousands of people
a year. He would do it closer to home.) But Up in the Air is,
irrevocably, a synthetic narrative about that which is synthetic; it
can't even put the conventions across with any credibility. The focus
group-informed corporate committee that wrote this screenplay couldn't
decide how to portray the character's transformation, so it tried three
or four different tropes, none of them very convincing. Underwritten
scenes alternate with scenes that meander. Worst of all, Up in the
Air has got the wrong lead actor. George Clooney may have a really
high Q Score, but I don't think he plays soul-cleansing or moral epiphany
very well.
The
best thing in Up in the Air is its picture of cold empty late
capitalism: cities are interchangeable clots of skyscrapers, suburbs
and highways, seen from the air; the middle-corporate glass-house architecture
is uniform, coast to coast; Clooney and his counterparts roll their
bags up and down the endless concourses of IAD and ORD and DFW and MSP.
I thought of Jacques Tati's Playitme, but that sort of wit
is absent here. A first-rate 21st century Godard film is buried somewhere
deep in Up in the Air -- what he could do with all that air
and land geometry, the glass walls and frames and concourses, how he
could lay out the architecture of the characters' lives in some authentic
way. But Up in the Air is a beta-tested and processed movie
experience; the careers of its "creatives" will rise or fall
on the profit points and the awards babble; and who am I to say that
their focus groups were in fact mistaken? Anna Kendrick gives a wonderful
performance as a brittle young functionary.
*
In
A Single Man, cool designer Tom Ford has flattened,
pruned and polished Christopher Isherwood’s novel. A cross-section
of a gay professor’s reality is now mostly a story of closeted
loss and mourning, with too much told in dreamy fuzzy flashbacks. This
is Ford's first film, and Fashion Guy's entry into filmmaking has not
been unanimously welcomed. Ultimately I surrendered to the visual style,
but there are some alarming casting choices here: Jon Kortajarena and
Nicholas Hoult are far too beautiful for their roles. and Ford's camera
makes matters worse by adoring them, and their well-chosen clothing,
extravagantly. They're soft-pornish distractions from the story, and
the story here is serious business. (Hoult does give a good performance.)
I'm
falling in with the conventional critical wisdom here: see this for
Colin Firth and Julianne Moore. Firth has mastered various degrees and
shades of bundled-up reticence. Moore gives a hot performance that bursts
through all the cool -- a lonely single woman who's trying to keep her
glamor going, a sweet drunk full of bitter humor and desperate, angry
longing.
Ford makes distinctly pretty pictures; I don't mind that at all. And
he's got good instincts about where to put the camera, how to set up
a 
scene.
But at present he's a good director of scenes rather than movies, and
some of the scenes are much better than others. Moore's star turn is
beautifully handled, but a big classroom scene needs focus, and the
film's ending lands with a thud. A stronger director could have made
a whole story out of A Single Man. Instead it's mostly parts;
but for God's sake go see it, for Isherwood and for Firth and Moore.
©2010 Les Phillips
CineScene
