Jason Reitman (Thank You For Smoking, Juno) made the film Up in the Air around two years ago. At the time of its release, the film's many social themes and implications were direct and quite American, reflecting the rise of unemployment and the lingering atmosphere of uncertainty for many families whose futures were as veiled as the sun on a cloudy day. The film calls attention to this contemporary mentality as the film, after the credits, starts off with a montage of talking heads who quiver in their speech about being fired from a job; stability to tumult in an instance. We are then introduced to George Clooney's character Ryan Bingham and the story takes off. Up in the Air is definately a film for its time but some would speculate it is a film of all time, timeless films that transcend their contemporary ideologies and extend through time to proceeding generations and newer societies. Sometimes, a film is so caught up within its own time and the mentalities hinged upon that time that after some years its power starts to dwindle since it is too caught up with its own problems in its own present. Up in the Air definately has that risk since it is saturated in contemporary socieconomic flare; it is up to the viewer to decide how for this film can go with its themes. I stand in the region that thinks Up in the Air is and will be timeless. There are a couple reasons for this, including how it is a document of American society during the gargantuan recession, of the internal struggle many Americans felt during a time of great obscurity. Yet, I want to talk about another reason, geared towards the aesthetics and thier function of the film. There is something brilliant in the way Reitman creates a film, like his predessesors, of conventional blueprints but ever so slightly shifts towards an unconventional direction. In Up in the Air he puts on his finest display, shifting direction both subtly and starkly such that the film shifts from a conventional drama towards something much more tragic and also from a place of slight predictability to a realm of irony and desolation. Reitman's story does this, and I want to show you how through key scenes and narrative functions.
For most of the film the audience is drawn to the lifestyle of Ryan Bingham and both his conflict with technology through Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) and his relationship with the female version of himself in Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga). We are drawn to the tensions between the old and new methods of firing people as well as the unpredictability and abruptness of a heated affair. So, in light of these foundations the audience is concerned about if Ryan will submit to the advancing technology or/and he will actually fall in love with Alex. Two keys scenes highlight these conflicts. One is the scene where Natalie fires someone via the internet yet she finds out in the most uncomfortable fashion that the man she is firing is in the room right next to her, so she can still observe the individual's devastated mentality. The other scene invloves Natalie and Ryan as Natalie tries to contemplate the reason why Ryan has not fallen in love with Alex after all they have done. Ryan states he doesn't need love and doesn't need someone knacking him about it. These two visualizations of conflict here to both flesh out the characters philosophies and differences but also guide the audience into taking note of these differences. Now, these are key because they are forms of coventional executions, showing the epitome of conflict; one scene to depict what the proceeding scenes built up to.
From here we will most generally see the characters reacting differently and in a revelatory sense, follow th second half of their character arc. And the characters definately do; Natalie sees the humanity and direct interaction lost in the new technological means of firing people and Ryan starts to see Alex in a new, more caring, light. Yet, instead of fleshing it out further these two character arcs and then end the film on a positive note, Jason then subtly changes the direction of the film's narrative. Ryan and Natalie abruptly part ways since he decides to go to his sister's wedding and also decides to bring along Alex along because he doesn't want to be the guy sitting at the bar alone anymore. The uncertain relationship between Ryan and Alex is continued as the technological conflict is put on hold, but Jason makes the audience's focus more one the interactions between Ryan and his family. Editing is slower and this makes way for the conversations to become awkward and empty. Alex plays as the safe haven for Ryan as he keeps looking at her in a restrainingly desperate manner as he listens to his future brother-in-law talk about his company. She seems to become the more natural figure in Ryan's life that our tensions shift away from the uncertainty between Ryan and Alex and onto the unfolding interplay between Ryan and his family since we know Ryan is in an extremely uncomfortable position; a stationary world were people move at two miles per hour instead of eight hundred miles per hour. This feeling is enhanced during the sequence with Ryan and Alex as they visit is high school followed by the abrupt intrusion of his sister's plea for help. The sequence feels natural, predictable, and conventional that we expect the positive conclusion to their relationship and so we realize the tensions brought forth by the sister's intrusion to the ideal situation of Ryan's changing mentality. Thus he parts with Alex for a time to try and help his sister with her husband-to-be who has cold feet. Notice now that the film slyly injects Ryan's most illuminating moment without the prescence of Alex and we are thus focused solely on what he has to say, how his philosophy has changed, and how this changed man can help another in a situation far removed from his lifestyle.
So resolution comes the the marraige and everyone is happy, now the audience is thinking, "The only thing left Ryan has to is to profess his love for Alex." A roadblock occurs when she has to leave, when Ryan has to remain stationary and watch Alex return to the hyper-mobile lifestyle, focusing back on the uncertainty of their relationship. When Ryan can't take it anymore, his love for Alex overpowering any sort of qualities he has had for a long time, he immediately flies to Chicago to express himself. The conventional process is incorporated, showing his ignorance to the sloppiness being commited, like how he forgot to swipe his Gold Member Card for Hertz and the employee shouts after him as a signal to us all that he really has changed because of the love he has for Alex. All this constructs the mainstream narrative direction the audience should be familiar with, as what makes a film mainstream is the ability for the audience to go into the film predicting what is going to happen and applies their sense of escapism on that notion. But then the twist happens. You know, the title 'Up in the Air' is relevent to many elements of the story and setting and aesthetics, none so potent as the moment Ryan realizes Alex's 'real' life; a slap in the face to many viewer, although there are always some that predict a twist, but that's no the point. The brilliance of this whole sequence is the Reitman uses convential narrative structures to manipulate our understanding of the characters and set up our own expectations as how the film will unravel. The stillness of this revealing scene is reinforced by the fact that the scene is basically lacking of dialogue; Ryan backs away looking defeated and seeming to realize he is in place of discomfort. Alex looks down at him with a penetrating gaze as if to say, "What did you expect?" Well, what did we expect? The convetionality of the story to remain the whole way through? This is where the story, with tragic immediacy, destroys its conventional structure and reorganizes the pieces to create an unconventional ending staying true to the name of the film.
This scene pushes the direction of the narrative into an ironic tone, though not before Jason hits the audience with another unfortunate twist; one of the employees Natalie fires kills themself, as we are told through conversation between Ryan and his boss in which when the boss says Natalie quit we see an insertion shot of her on a moving path, away from the camera, as if depicting the distancing she has with the corporation and Ryan's way of life. So now any notion of conventional wisdom is thrown out the window, we are left to try to situate ourselves with any emotional normalcy. For instance, if we look at this film with love and relationships as the focal theme, we see that by then end of the film no relationships are retained among the main characters and, more specifically, none of them find love (though, one could say Ryan has mended his trust with his family, especially when he placed his miles in an account for his sister and brother-in-law, but our lasting impression is not on the familial relationship but on Ryan and Alex, again with the conventional manipulation) and the all end up seperate from each other, the last interaction the three main characters have is when Ryan sends the letter of recommendation to Natalie's new employer. This desolation, espeicailly with Ryan, returns us back to a place of human disconnect; returning us to how we viewed Ryan and his lifestyle at the beginning of the film. This return is set up in a similar way with that of the beginning structurally; both end with the juxtaposition between a talking heads sequence followed by a voice over of Ryan. The end, though, holds an unsurmountable amount if power as it soaks up every other theme, relation, and plot point to leaves us with hope and Ryan, and I don't mean that they both go together. The talking heads sequence has the interviewees, the men and woman just laid off, discussing what makes them keep on running. It is the hope and love their family carries with them, the care that is expressed through them, and the determination they give them. I don't know who is a real person who has been laid off of who is performing, buth there is something about it that is directly human and compassionate. And that is the point. Jason's framing and position of the human, unique to the rest of the film, wants to just to hear what they have to say but also observe their faces, the physiognomy as it fluctuates and shifts from emotion to emotion, thought to thought. This very human episode is then cut to Ryan's position; isolation becomes the adjective instead of human as he is back to his 'normal' lifestyle, albeit reluctantly. His return to the airport gives rise to an action that echoes Natalie's ida of picking a random place and going there; he lets go of his natural grip on his luggage and stares at the departure board. One could say that he is doen't want to return to his old way of life and wants to step out of the immobile (so to speak) and linear realm and enter a realm of exciting uncertainty. If that's the case, his position, though, is tragic in a sense because he has to maintain his way of life that he now finds problematic. The mise-en-scene in this shot shows Ryan diminutive to the flight board that could care less to any personal conflict he may be having. A reaction shot affirms this feeling of loss of direction, Clooney makes his character stare but in deep thought. Where can he go? Who can he go to? The end monologue in voiceover narration exemplifies this feeling of desolation and dislocation (dislocation for the first time in his life probably since he rides jets for a living), told in a linguistical tone that seems more melancholy than reassuing which was the tone present in Ryan's opening monologue:
Tonight most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and squealing kids. Their spouses will ask about their day, and tonight they’ll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places. And one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over.
During this monologue the film cuts to a long shot of the sky, a beautiful landscape of clouds, shadowed by the fact that the sun has descended below, its crown creeping only slightly over the horizon. You can't see any trace of land, you are subjected to the higher dominion of the skies. It is a lonely shot, especially as the music takes one final breath, a powerfully sustained note, and drops out, letting the audience watch as we float on above the white kingdom. Up in the Air fully calls attention to itself at this point, and the audience feels the same way especially during the last twenty minutes of the film where everything nominal under the outlines of the narrative have been crumpled up and thrown away. It is the lasting testament, as an aspiring filmmaker, that I take from this film, the manipulation of the audience to follow a predictable path of American film convention and swiftly shift gears towards an isolated, ironic, and unconventional direction. To invest our emotions in much of the relationships and conflicts that rise in the film and then strip it away faster than we can apprehend is a tricky thing to do, especially if the film itself is considered mainstream. Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, noted how Jason Reitman is one of the most ambitiuos mainstream filmmakers around. I believe that, too, but Up in the Air is the film that encompasses this trait, as I consider it far more substantial than his popular Juno. It is great storytelling, one that is familiar, human, intelligent, and emitting such uncertainty in such subtle execution such that we see the trasformation of a suave yet austere man into a man of care in love only to lose it in a rapid climax, refraining into a void of singularity and loneliness.
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