Up in the Air
Jan. 11th, 2010 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tartysuzA couple of weeks ago, we couldn't get into Avatar, so we saw Brothers instead. A few days after that, we set out for The Road and wound Up in the Air.
For some reason, the downtown cinecomplex that we frequent often has showtimes and entire shows altogether misrepresented in the listings. I was surprised to see that The Road was still playing, so I should have expected another mistake. Lesson: if it seems too good to be true, it is.
Plan B was Up in the Air, a film about how we as individuals and as cogs in corporations treat ourselves, our lives and the lives of other people.
George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a consultant who works for a company to which corporations outsource the job of firing people. Firing people is messy, personal, traumatic, and all manner of sticky stuff that gums up the cogs of a well-oiled corporate machine. Clooney's job is to fly all over America, parachuting in like a surgical strike specialist, doing his damage and leaving without having to deal with any of the fallout. But Ryan himself becomes endangered as the firm hires a young hotshot with the punny name of Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) who takes streamlining one step further by grounding the likes of Ryan and meeting clients by videoconference: remote firings.
The film is very lyrical, exploring the three-way metaphor of travel, life journey and the two meanings of the word career. To wit:
I did find it interesting that, despite using filming real people who were actually laid off, the film was not much of a sociological comment on layoffs and the corporate culture. There's nothing particularly wrong with that: it's clearly not the film Jason Reitman wanted to make with Up in the Air. But it did keep all the issues safely and manageably in a white collar, middle class arena, an idea that had been chafing the edge of my consciousness until I read this passage by Christine Gledhill in the anthology Women in Film Noir (ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 1998):
This is where the film might have been a bit more compelling. The struggles are ultimately internal to the protagonists because they have power, resources and means in their lives and over their careers. When Ryan humbly donates a large part of his air mile points to his newlywed lower middle class sister, who can't afford a honeymoon, the scene reads first as a sign of moral progress in Ryan's character. But looking at it in the larger context, the gesture seems to be one of redistributing largess at least as much as it is about taking the first steps to re-establish relations with his family.
But given the parameters for the film, Up in the Air is a good, literary tale: thoughtful and nice, in the sense of being precise and neat.
For some reason, the downtown cinecomplex that we frequent often has showtimes and entire shows altogether misrepresented in the listings. I was surprised to see that The Road was still playing, so I should have expected another mistake. Lesson: if it seems too good to be true, it is.
Plan B was Up in the Air, a film about how we as individuals and as cogs in corporations treat ourselves, our lives and the lives of other people.
George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a consultant who works for a company to which corporations outsource the job of firing people. Firing people is messy, personal, traumatic, and all manner of sticky stuff that gums up the cogs of a well-oiled corporate machine. Clooney's job is to fly all over America, parachuting in like a surgical strike specialist, doing his damage and leaving without having to deal with any of the fallout. But Ryan himself becomes endangered as the firm hires a young hotshot with the punny name of Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) who takes streamlining one step further by grounding the likes of Ryan and meeting clients by videoconference: remote firings.
The film is very lyrical, exploring the three-way metaphor of travel, life journey and the two meanings of the word career. To wit:
- When Ryan is showing Natalie the ropes, he says. "We're here to make limbo tolerable." But at the end of the movie -- with his job in question, an unexpected relationship taking off then aborted, and the realization that it will take a lot of work to reintegrate his formerly selfish self into his family -- Ryan is left standing in front of a flight board with no clue of where he will be flying next. He's in limbo, up in the air.
- When Ryan and Natalie meet, Ryan's big goal in life is to amass 10 million air miles: he is all about the journey without being particular about the destination. Meanwhile, Natalie's goal is to get immediate results: she is all about the destination and misses out on the joys of the journey.
- Both Ryan and Natalie are summarily fired from relationships, and both remotely: she by text message and he by phone.
- Ryan thinks he's found his soulmate in Alex (note the deliberately masculine name), a woman who says she's him but with a vagina. They meet in a moment of shared acquisition porn: comparing vehicle rental companies and travel points is their idea of foreplay. But she ultimately sees all of that as an escape from a family life the she doesn't tell Ryan about, while he is honestly invested in it.
- When a broken-hearted Natalie asks Ryan and Alex (Vera Farmiga) about their perfect mates, Alex speaks of a less-than-perfect husband, in a way that has Ryan thinking that she's talking about the future him, when she's really talking about the present Alex. Add that to her casual revelation that she's dated women, and we have a picture of a woman who has a habit of being transgressive vis-a-vis the hetero, nuclear family norm. I've read criticism that Alex is a bitch, but she never lies and never presents herself as something she isn't. She just omits certain things at certain times, and Ryan is too busy projecting him onto her to actually get to know her.
I did find it interesting that, despite using filming real people who were actually laid off, the film was not much of a sociological comment on layoffs and the corporate culture. There's nothing particularly wrong with that: it's clearly not the film Jason Reitman wanted to make with Up in the Air. But it did keep all the issues safely and manageably in a white collar, middle class arena, an idea that had been chafing the edge of my consciousness until I read this passage by Christine Gledhill in the anthology Women in Film Noir (ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 1998):
Besides masking the social origins of [those socio-economic forces which produce the social formation], bourgeois ideology finds means to produce their illusory unification through such notions as 'the common interest'; or fundamentally antagonistic material contradictions are displaced on to idealist contradictions within bourgeois ideology which are amenable to resolution -- such as the conflict between love and honour in neo-classical drama.
This is where the film might have been a bit more compelling. The struggles are ultimately internal to the protagonists because they have power, resources and means in their lives and over their careers. When Ryan humbly donates a large part of his air mile points to his newlywed lower middle class sister, who can't afford a honeymoon, the scene reads first as a sign of moral progress in Ryan's character. But looking at it in the larger context, the gesture seems to be one of redistributing largess at least as much as it is about taking the first steps to re-establish relations with his family.
But given the parameters for the film, Up in the Air is a good, literary tale: thoughtful and nice, in the sense of being precise and neat.
