I usually run a mile from the kind of George Clooney-staring Romantic adventure that this looked suspiciously like but luckily I gave it a few minutes and found that it is in fact a pretty refreshing story. "Up in the Air" is a bit kooky, but in a good way. But there's a fascinating sub-plot I wish I'd understood when I watched it.
The plot is a simple one. Clooney plays a man deliberately bereft of belongings or relationships who flies about the US - obsessed with loyalty points – firing people for a living. As you can imagine, in the current environment this keeps him pretty busy. (Trailer.)
But for once the extras – in both senses of the word – are as important as the main attraction (I guess also in both senses of the word for ladies). They feature the kind of short interviews with the director - Jason Reitman, of "Juno" and "Thank you for smoking" - and some of the actors which are usually meaningless and completely unrevealing. But in this instance, it focuses on two aspects of the film. The first and less important is that all the airport scenes were shot not in the studio, but in...the airports! I didn’t immediately register what the chief challenge of this would be until they explained – there are constant announcements! So the number of takes they had to do were usually many-multiples. I should watch it again to see how this improves the scenes or demeans them as the protagonists must have been really quite jaded with the dialogue by the umpteenth time!However, the yet more interesting thing is that, in order to convey the true pain, humiliation and shock of being fired, instead of attempting to imagine lines himself, the Reitman invited recently fired people from real life to deliver their own recollections on screen. So what you see – and again I didn’t realise as I watched but did suspect – is real people talking about really getting fired in language they either did or would have liked to have used at the time. They were taken mainly from the Detroit area which as you probably appreciate with the complete implosion of the US car industry provided a great deal of material.They describeit as a movie of its time, examining present day dislocation in two ways. First, the dislocation brought by sudden termination at a time of 10 per cent unemployment and in some case too late in life to easily re-train. But also the kind of dislocation brought to many people so dedicated to their work that they are constantly up in the air, with no time for real relationships and dependent only on the internet and phone network for any friednly human interaction.So... worth a watch, very thought provoking.