Drowning In A Culture Of Detachment: Up In The Air

A number of good-or-great reviews are coming in for George Clooney's Up In The Air. This review, by Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, may be the most thoughtful one out there - especially in terms of laying bare where the film intersects with larger theological questions/concerns.

Excerpt Below // Full Article Here

Here are a few of the kinds of movies that I wish Hollywood made more often (like, you know, two or three times a year): a drama that connects to an audience because it taps, in a bold and immediate way, into the fears and anxieties of our time; a romantic comedy in which the dialogue pings with stylish wit and verve; a film that keeps surprising us because its characters keep surprising themselves. The beauty of Up in the Air is that it's all those things at once. Adapted from Walter Kirn's 2001 novel, it's a rare and sparkling gem of a movie, directed by Jason Reitman (Juno) with the polish of a master.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), the film's debonair hero, is a new kind of no-sweat corporate executioner. Each day, he walks into a different office somewhere in the United States — Wichita, Detroit, St. Louis — and gets a list of employees who are about to be downsized. One by one, he sits opposite each of them, bringing them the bad news that their bosses are too weaselly to deliver personally. The victims are mostly hardworking middle managers who've been let go because of the economy. None of them ''deserves'' to be fired, and so their reactions — terror, confusion, rage, despair — are notably intense, even as Ryan reassures them that opportunities await, that this is a beginning not an ending, and blah blah blah. (He's also a part-time motivational speaker, pepping up the very sorts of people he fires.)

The ''interviews'' that Ryan does with the folks he fires give you a chill. They're a vision of what's going on in the country today, and Up in the Air is the rare film that does justice to economic desperation by expressing it with an honest populist embrace. At the same time, it's a movie about how one man living inside the cocoon of an overly detached culture comes to see the error of his own detachment. Up in the Air is light and dark, hilarious and tragic, romantic and real. It's everything that Hollywood has forgotten how to do; we're blessed that Jason Reitman has remembered.

If Ryan had been played by anyone but George Clooney, we might not believe in (or like) him. But Clooney, with his effortless, cracklingly smart yet maybe slightly-too-polished charm, knows here, as he did in Michael Clayton, how to play a rogue who's in danger of losing his soul yet holds on to it anyway. In Up in the Air, Clooney gives his most fully felt performance to date as a smooth hedonist who comes to realize that he may be drowning. This is movie-star acting of the sort that no one else today can bring off.