Cast: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, Tamala Jones, Chris Lowell
Genre: Comedy | Drama
Release Date: December 4, 2009
Company: Paramount Pictures
Plot
RYAN Bingham is a corporate downsizing expert, whose life up in the friendly skies becomes his only world as he works to reach his one-millionth frequent flyer mile. Ryan’s boss hires a young, upstart efficiency expert, Natalie, who develops a method of video conferencing that will allow termination without ever leaving the office — essentially threatening the existence Ryan so cherishes. Faced with the prospect, at once terrifying and exhilarating, of being grounded, Ryan begins to contemplate what it might actually mean to have a home.
Review
UP in the Air makes it look easy. Not just in its casual and apparently effortless excellence, but in its ability to blend entertainment and insight, comedy and poignancy, even drama and reality, things that are difficult by themselves but a whole lot harder in combination. This film does all that and never seems to break a sweat.
The questions Up in the Air gracefully pose while it is thoroughly entertaining us is whether Bingham’s minimalism can survive unexpected contact with genuine emotion, and if so what will be the extent of the collateral damage? The answers turn out to be surprisingly complex, a further reason to celebrate a director who, both literally and metaphorically, has filmmaking in his bones.
Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
REITMAN’S best, most audacious move turns out to be his choice to begin and end Up in the Air with interviews with the recently downsized, most of them real-life. These sequences give what could have been a pleasurable enough bagatelle a thoroughly unexpected air of gravitas and pathos.
Up in the Air is a timeless movie that’s utterly of its time — a movie of humor, heart and mind.
Ann Hornaday, Washington Post
THE razor-sharp editing by Dana Glauberman gives the film a breezy momentum even while it’s delivering piercing social insights. It’s rare for a movie to be at once so biting and so moving. If Ryan’s future seems bleak, there’s at least something exhilarating about a movie made with such clear-eyed intelligence.
