It's always a pleasure to watch a Hollywood film that doesn't try to beat the viewer upside the head with 3-D explosions or overwhelm with more cuts than the viewer's mind knows what to do with. However, it's always a displeasure to watch a Hollywood film that flaunts an inflated sense of its own cuteness. The second of these two unwritten laws is what made director Jason Reitman's last film, ""Juno,"" so unapologetically dreadful: That movie was 95% prefab swagger and 5% self-congratulation. My intensely negative response to ""Juno"" is partly responsible for my comparatively positive response to Reitman's latest, the highly acclaimed ""Up in the Air.""
In a sense, ""Up in the Air"" is a throwback to Hollywood comedies released during the Great Depression: traces of Preston Sturges's ""Sullivan's Travels"" and Howard Hawks's ""His Girl Friday"" are embedded within the grain of this film. George Clooney has often been compared to ""His Girl Friday"" star Cary Grant, and Clooney's slick yet fragile performance in ""Up in the Air"" does little to discredit this comparison. But what makes ""Up in the Air"" feel so retro is the tightness of its construction—I can't remember the last time I saw continuity editing handled in such a lucid and non-patronizing fashion—and the consistency of its overall look.
In recent years, urban theorists have written of the airport as being a ""non-space,"" a place that is little more than a transitory space between here and there, wherever ""here"" and ""there"" may be. Clooney's character, whose existence is almost entirely restricted to airports and nearby hotels, is thus depicted as leading a non-life. Yes, ""Up in the Air"" frequently and regrettably finds the most obvious way possible to illustrate the rootlessness of its protagonist. (His apartment in Omaha is utterly empty! He neither wants to get married nor have kids! He's nearly earned his ten-millionth frequent-flyer mile!) Yet ""Up in the Air"" also has the audacity to show how ridiculous corporate kitsch is (case in point: the cameo by Young MC), how weird text-messaging and video-chatting have made even the simplest social interactions and how inescapable brands have become here in the American Empire.
As a sweet if ultimately nauseating love story and as a work of indirect sociology, ""Up in the Air"" is more or less likable. However, the film is all too eager to hammer home its message, and that's where things get messy. Like the aforementioned Depression-era comedies, ""Up in the Air"" takes employment—or rather, unemployment—as one of its main subjects. But rather than confront the cause of mass lay-offs head-on, ""Up in the Air"" resorts to the easiest and most condescending sort of liberal moralizing. Nobody will mistake Reitman or Clooney or even Walter Kirn (the author of the novel from which the film is adapted) for heartless right-wingers or idealistic reds; but considering the sorry state of the contemporary United States, that's not necessarily a good thing.
Likewise, ""Up in the Air"" has been praised for its strong female characters, the two most visible of which are played admirably by Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick. But these two women are allowed to ride beside Clooney's sensitive yet unmistakably masculine character only on the condition that they agree to play his game. You don't have to be a card-carrying Freudian to see that ""Up in the Air"" is a film about how big Clooney's character's penis is and how, in order to be his equal, one must pretend to have a penis just as big as his. A flirtatious exchange between Clooney's and Farmiga's characters just prior to their initial hook-up, not to mention the various moments of symbolic castration experienced by Clooney's character during the film's latter stages, validates this interpretation. In ""Up in the Air,"" a woman can only be a man's equal if she out-mans him, whether that be through having an allergy to commitment or through believing that sex is merely an activity that helps to pass the time while traveling from Point A to Point B—sort of like drinking $5 beers on a domestic flight. So much for feminism.
The aesthetics of ""Up in the Air"" are as encouraging as the film's politics are disappointing. This movie is a fine, well-designed product, but how much can you consume before you start to feel sick to your stomach?
