UP IN THE AIR

dMYD
Starring George Clooney

Y

Any pretentious film student/town drunk will scream at you that all films say something big and important about their own time, from Apocalypse Now (WE WERE AT WAR) to Sleepless in Seattle (NO ONE LIKES TOM HANKS). Sometimes it’s blindingly obvious, sometimes it’s buried in such swathes of subtlety and surface prettiness that a bearded muso will still sick up his theory that Donnie Darko was about feudal Japanese clansmen at a dinner party three full years after the film’s release. Up in the Air belongs largely in the former camp. A daringly bleak picture of being a modern day human bipedal, it stands as one of the few great carved monoliths of western civilization’s confused status at the beginning of the new millennium and it does it by having George Clooney make a young woman burst into tears by telling her how rubbish everything is. Essentially a romantic comedy, the film skips between many aspects of human connection, some good, some war-crime atrocious, using Clooney’s latte-smooth one man firing squad to contain and embody all points in-between of being a stunted animal forced to live in a world of wireless broadband and LCD. Clooney generally plays the same character in all his films, but here his stereotype is dumped into such an odd and depressing cycle of events that an entirely new performance emerges, one that barges about with the lowest dregs of disconnection but retains the crucial sparks of decency needed to keep an audience interested. Amazingly shot throughout, the pacing of the locations and the odd, fake brightness of the airports and hotels present a world of pointless, perfunctory opulence, a system going through motions it no longer entirely understands. For popcorn spilling gurners it’s a film about the recession, but for everyone else it’s a film about everyone else, finally turning romantic cliché on it’s face and presenting a daring new aerial-path for human satisfaction to follow in an increasingly futuretastic new century. From the guy who directed Juno. Colour me impressed.