"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.
Credit for this coup goes to writer-director Jason Reitman, who made Walter Kirn's novel his own, using it as the jumping off point for a bittersweet look at the life and times of a happy road warrior, beautifully played by George Clooney, who willingly spends so much of his life on airplanes that he's not exaggerating when he says "to know me you have to fly with me."
Reitman's previous film as a writer-director was the expertly done "Thank You for Smoking" (he also directed Diablo Cody's "Juno" script), but "Up in the Air," co-written by Sheldon Turner, is a step forward -- both in the way it gets the very best out of actors and in its ability to make things funny without sacrificing honesty and intelligence.
More than that, as Reitman himself has said, in the six years he worked on the script, the filmmaker married, had a child, and changed and matured as a person. When one of his characters says, "life is better with company," we can sense it comes from the heart.
"This is the most personal film I've ever made," Reitman has said, and what that means is that "Up in the Air" has been constructed with an underlying warmth and concern about character and an accompanying understanding of what's of value in life, of what it means to be human in all senses of the word.
Before we even meet our protagonist, "Up in the Air" makes a pair of inspired choices. It plays a hip-hop Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings version of Woody Guthrie's venerable "This Land Is Your Land" over a variety of aerial shots of American landscapes, an offbeat and striking choice that says the things you are about to see are going to shake up your sense of the familiar. It also helps create the film's wonderful air of inclusion, the feeling that we can all happily share in the experience that's about to unfold.
