Film review: Up in the air

Up in the air. 109 minutes. Rated M. Directed by Jason Reitman; Written by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner; Based on a novel by Walter Kim.

Depending entirely on how secure your own job is and how devoted you are to the charismatic charms of one Mr George Clooney, there is every possible chance you'll chuckle along with one or two engaging, albeit fleeting, moments throughout this lithe, mercilessly fatuous, one-note romantic comedy. What is more likely, however, is that by the time you wake up in the morning, you'll have forgotten you even saw it. If ever there was a film that fails to translate its insular, celebrity-inspired Hollywood take on the meaning of family and relevance of employment and job satisfaction to our way of life – this is it.

Inexplicably nominated for three of this year's Academy Awards® (including Best Picture) and the winner of last month's Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay, Up in the air is one of those well-made, precise Hollywood flicks that bathes in the excesses of its own conceit and leaves you, well, up in the air about what to make of it all.

Ryan Bingham (our effervescent Mr Clooney) is employed to fly around the United States of America telling people they no longer have a job. When super-sacker Natalie Keener (a straight-jacketed Anna Kendrick) joins the team to implement an online (webcam-based) version of this process, Mr Bingham's penchant for frequent flyer points (and his prized membership of any number of other loyalty programs) is severely compromised.

Up in the Air's cursory nod to the full extent of the underlying drama of what is at stake here is approached with a startling nonchalance, but no more than you might expect from a script that determinedly denies any dramatic context. It chooses, instead, to remain dedicated to its very-pleased-with-ourselves polish and intellectual bankruptcy. The lowpoint (from which the film fails to recover) comes when one of the poor souls who threatens to commit suicide if she's sacked, actually does. The inconvenience of this whole unfortunate episode is glossed over in barely a minute or two of screen time. Now, while that plot-point obviously fails to mean something to the filmmakers, it's an astonishing error of judgment on their part to think it will mean nothing to us – despite how cleverly 'romantic' and 'comedic' they think they're being.

Mr Reitman (the far more entertaining Thank you for smoking and Juno) delivers a polished product that fails, at every turn, to speak to us on any meaningful level. The script takes a cautious and incredibly self-concsious side-step into oh-so-familiar family drama territory, but sensing that it's all becoming a bit risky and meaningful, departs again – without revealing to us anything we haven't already seen before countless times, and to much greater (and memorable) effect.

This review was commissioned by the Geraldton Newspapers Group and was published in the print edition of the Geraldton Guardian.