Flicked Off: 'Up in the Air'
There’s so many different reasons to see a movie! Sometimes, you will be walking by a theater, and it will be playing A Serious Man, starting in fifteen minutes, and you’ll think “What the hell!” And then, 110 minutes later, you’ll be like, “Hey, that was a kickass, awesome godamned movie, why did I not see it before?” Or sometimes I, like many people in America, will go to a film just see an actor (which is why I have seen every Julianne Moore and Frances McDormand and Holly Hunter movie ever). By those standards, Up in the Air is a damn fine bit of bait. George Clooney, at 48 still outrageously sex-up-able, turns out to be great as a compulsive traveler, romance-avoider and layer-offer of people. (“A mammoth performance,” gargled Rex Reed!) Vera Farmiga, equipped with what she called her post-childbirth “giant porn boobs”, is not overwhelmed by that chestiness and is for real just wonderful. Pointy-faced little Anna Kendrick? Totally awesome. Like, delightful. She is a great sidekick/foil, and Farmiga is a great sexual (not particularly romantic) interest. (Also, awkward times for the Supporting Actress promotion departments, which, whatever.) But sometimes when you go to see a movie for the performances, even when you are satisfied or pleased or awed, you are left troubled.
The film-it is about a loner, yes, who travels about laying people off, then sometimes getting with Farmiga’s character? This you know?-has a number of brief segments of people getting fired from their jobs, performed for the camera, with, as I recall at least, Clooney sometimes cut in. (Clearly he was not present for that bit of shooting.) So the real story is, as Doree Shafrir wrote the other day, about the screening we both attended:
[W]hen I went to a screening of Up In the Air a few weeks ago, [director Jason] Reitman said in a Q&A; afterwards that he had placed ads in the local papers saying that he was shooting a documentary about people who had been laid off, and when the people showed up for their “audition,” he never told them that their wrenching confessions of what it felt like to be laid off were going to be not in a documentary about the economy, but a $25 million feature film half-backed by his father Ivan (
Ghostbusters!). Who knows, maybe he told them later (though he didn’t mention this in the Q&A;), and clearly this guy Kevin Pilla is now aware how his “performance” was used.
In the Q&A; Reitman seemed really thrilled at the authenticity of the performances he had gotten out of these “real” people. But knowing how he got them made me feel icky.
It is so icky. But, the other thing is that these reenactments of getting laid off that he asked people to perform are not particularly good! They tend to slip into past tense, or start describing, instead of performing, and in no way does it look these people are actually being terminated as part of the script. It just doesn’t actually work, and it leaves these lingering questions about Reitman and his disclosures. (On the plus side-he did pay them! So that’s great! Yay Reitman!)
Also, the picture above is of Bush 41 introducing the film at a screening, to the much-Twittered delight of the director. I have formed a fairly bad impression of Reitman, based on what little I know of him-what I’ve heard from people who’ve interviewed him, and that screening and his Twitter. And that Tom Ford profile today. He may be a pretty nice guy! But the egotism is off-putting. You make movies, honey! Though I’ll give you this: you’re not bad.
Because it’s unfortunate that this thing happened with the unemployed non-actors, because it’s bad for a pretty good movie. You will enjoy this movie, I suspect. It is fun to watch! Its plot is happily unpredictable! I do not however think it is the movie “for our times” that everyone keeps saying it is, just because it has a lot of unemployed people in it. I mean, Twilight has a lot of horny high school teens, just like real life, but that doesn’t mean it’s the chronicle of our age or whatever. Or wait, is it?