Review: Up in the Air (Theatrical)

I know I had to see this one before the award season goes absolutely insane (which to me, starts after this week's Golden Globes), and since this movie is/was/will be a front runner for the Best Picture win, it is a must-see on the list of movies to must-see.

So does it hold up? Is it really that good?

Yes. I hearted this movie. More than I thought I would. I knew the basic premise, Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who works for a company that is hired by other companies to fire their employees. He spends his whole life disconnected from others, up in the air (duh name of movie), flying from one city to another with no connections with his family and no friends, despite being surrounded by people all the time. On one trip he meets Alex (Vera Farmiga) a woman who though we don't find out what her job is (it doesn't matter to the plot), is just like Ryan - always on the go, disconnected from life and the two start a romance, meeting each other when they can. Along comes a young person from Ryan's company, Natalie (played by Anna Kendrick - be back to that) who thinks instead of flying to places to fire them, doing it online via video from their home office would be cheaper and more productive. Ryan thinks she's wrong and brings her on a trip across the country with him to fire people. I won't ruin the rest of the movie, but it's a buddy movie, romantic comedy, and drama rolled into one with an extreme dark edge to it.

The darkness comes from the fired employees who react in both comical and awful ways (turns out many of those were played by real people who had been fired in the months before filming - it was quite effective regardless) as well as some very unexpected twists that dropped my jaw in shock. It has a quite unhappy ending, something I didn't expect from watching the previous hour and half, but it was a proper way to end a movie this dark.

A couple of things I really liked was how the writer and director, Jason Reitman (of Thank You For Smoking and Juno fame - two movies I really liked), made these very unlikeable characters likeable and relatable, just as he had done in his other movies. I especially identified with Anna Kendrick's character, and not just because she was in CAMP. Seriously, she stole that movie with her beyond her years version of "Ladies Who Lunch" from Company. What up rest of cast of Camp? Oh yeah, the main girl got fat and starred as Sharpay in a Baltimore production of High School Musical. True story. Kendrick will be Oscar nominated for this one for sure. But Kendrick's recent college grad was at a crossroads in her life, in a job she doesn't want to settle in, but might be, something I've been experiencing as of late.

I can't speak too highly of this movie, or frankly much more, because you need to see it for yourself and not get spoiled by me. Right now, it's between this movie and Avatar for Best Picture and the movies couldn't be more different. Equally good, YES. But where Avatar used film to bring you to a vivid new world, Up in the Air uses film to force you to see, up close and personal, the realities of living in the world today.

Patrick Approval Raiting: 10/10

Up in the Air @ imdb