Up In The Air

Director Jason Reitman continues his mastery of the American comedy with yet another winning, mainstream, character-driven effort that is as timely as it is perfectly classic. George Clooney steps seamlessly into the Cary Grant-type dapper cad role he was born to play as Ryan Bingham, a carefree soul who fires people for a living and does a little part-time lecturing about the unnecessary baggage of a home and family. He strikes up a shallow flirtation with an equally commerce hungry woman named Alex (Vera Farmiga) and lives his life with no strings attached. His great ambition is to amass 10 million frequent flier miles and join an elite club of travel snobs to have done so. Plans go awry when whip smart Cornell grad Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick resurrecting essential and beautifully crass elements of her breakthrough character from Rocket Science) proposes a cost effective reformatting of the company that would take workers off the road and have them do their firing duties via web cam. Bingham's objections to the system, which would ground his loose and unburdened lifestyle, leads his boss (Jason Bateman) to stick him on the road with Keener in an attempt to give her the work experience necessary to address Bingham's own complaints.

The film is a savvy blend of comedy and drama, sentiment and snark. It's so elementary and yet it stands out among most modern comedies as one of the few to really invest in characters and story instead of perpetrating low grade stupidity and begging for cheap laughs. Reitman has managed a natural flow that both feels realistic and maintains a certain radiant sheen that makes this as strong an effort to wear it's Hollywood glamour on its sleeve all year. Reitman couldn't not have sensed 1940s Grant in the writing of Ryan Bingham or missed the neatly cynical way his incorporation of depressing "firing testimonials" mirrors Rob Reiner's "real couple testimonials" in the structure of When Harry Met Sally. Many decades worth of romance and comedy get wisely condensed in this fine feature which still undoubtedly adds its own sharp, unique and particularly unmissable spin on all the tropes it recycles. Up In The Air is a moving, funny, and highly enjoyable film that will hopefully become as much of a breakout hit as Reitman's previous comic wonder, Juno. With each of his 3 films, the director has surpassed expectations and proved that fast, feeling, and funny films are far from lost on modern film audiences.

Grade: A