Happiness For Blessing

This review contains minor spoilers. You've been warned.

Let's think about the standard components of a standard romantic comedy. Funny? Check. A girl teaches a guy to stop being selfish and open up to others? Check. Said guy realizes this important fact at the exact moment that he's about to achieve his life goal, resulting in him going silent, then bolting for the door and ignoring requests to stay, followed by a "running through the airport and getting to the gate just in time" scene so he can go see her? Oh yeah.

Up in the Air is without a doubt a romantic comedy on the surface. Go snorkeling a little bit, though, and you'll find that there's so much more.

At its very core, UitA has a philosophical question for you - is having and cultivating relationships worth the trouble, or is having that much weight on your shoulders holding you back - personally or professionally? It's not a unique question for Hollywood - the content itself doesn't differentiate itself from, say, The Family Man starring Nicolas Cage, but the execution in answering that question sets it apart.

How so? For me, the scene that forces the issue is the one in Detroit. They're testing they're new technological way of firing people, which results in an odd set-up where Ryan (George Clooney) and Natalie (Anna Kendrick) are firing people from the next room. Ryan, a man who believes in keeping people at a distance, has been resisting the changes because he knows that helping someone "transition" requires a personal touch, but he hasn't noticed the tension until now. In the moment where a just-fired distraught employee walks past their conference room, Ryan gets it. I love it when the moment of realization in a character study is palpable like this. The director, Jason Reitman, also did Juno and Thank You for Smoking, and this is exactly what makes those movies great as well. In each of these three movies, you can see the main characters cognitively recognize how they're supposed to change, and here's the rub: they never do it right away. Isn't it like that in real life? It takes some time to change your actions even after you've changed your belief system.

Of course, what this does is set up a cheesy moment like the one I mentioned at the beginning, with the running through the airport and all. If you haven't seen the movie and you've read this far, I've already ruined it for you anyway, so I don't mind telling you that this actually happens. This is the struggle that I have with UitA: it was an amazing character study. All three characters did brilliantly. For the most part, the narrative structure was tight and purposeful. But it seemed like Reitman didn't know how to end it. The twist at the end was believable, but lazy. MAJOR SPOILER (highlight to read): Sure, the fact that Alex had a real family allowed her to say that line about Ryan being her escape from real life, but then why did she agree to go to the wedding? A better plot line would have been for her to have several other "escapes" that she encountered on the road. And let's not forget the gigantic elephant in the room: product placement. Call me a purist, but that was way too much. Overall, I really liked Up in the Air, but it suffered from some fatal flaws that make me wonder why it was nominated for Best Picture. 4/5