Up In The Air

Prescient cinema is always a bit tricky. United 93, for example, was, for me, a bit of an abomination, dealing as it did with the doomed occupants of a hijacked flight on that fateful day. There was no need: the film lent nothing to the devastating media reports, the bravery, the poignant horror. It airbrushed events for mass-palatability, for those that couldn’t really be bothered reading a newspaper, God forbid. Here, we have a film about down-sizing, redundancies, economic meltdown and those that capitalise on such devastation. It doesn’t render the job-loss experience as anything other than what it is: confusing and catastrophic. But it does manage to fashion a sophisticated romcom out of the debris.

George Clooney is a happily itinerant and un-moored p45 ghoul, paid handsomely to jump on and off planes around the US and fire people (whose responses are jump-cut encapsulated: tearful indignation, perplexed numbness, proud rage, incomprehensibility) and then do it all again, 300+ days a year. Home is whatever hotel room he currently occupies and responsibility and normal life are the preserve of weaklings.

He meets female equivalent Vera Farmiga (superb) in an airport bar and their status-obsessed exchanges lead to a transaction of a non-business kind; they agree to re-rendezvous as and when their schedules tally as they criss-cross the US and each other. Clooney is also soon saddled with the baggage of a zealously blank, icy go-getter type (Anna Kendrick, suitably vapid and reptilian – initially, at least) who he has to ‘show the ropes’ and who has derived a computer-based means of terminating employees without the inconvenience of even addressing them in person. She is a deadweight for about five minutes – they soon thaw each other out. A staple Hollywood tool for achieving this – alcohol – is made good use of.

Clooney also has the looming wedding of his sister to contend with, and the lack of a ‘Plus-one’ on his arm should he trouble himself with attending. Vera Farmiga, anyone?

Clooney and Kendrick go about their work until Kendrick realises she doesn’t have the stomach for it (well, that and her boyfriend dumps her) and Clooney is temporarily grounded as Kendrick’s new idea is jumped on and given the go-ahead. His oft-empty flat is no home but that’s his lot. To refer to the last 10 minutes in any detail or so would reveal and ruin the best hand the film has: you’ll see it coming by then but it’s a strangely downbeat, admirable way to play things out, and it makes sense in a world in which the likes of Clooney and his boss (Jason Bateman playing Patrick Bateman) thrive.

The film feels like the Coen Brothers meets Alexander Payne, and could’ve been a masterpiece, a touchstone for the times, Clooney’s best film, but instead feels like a charming, engaging missed-opportunity that you’ll be more than happy to watch again, partly because, Michael Clayton aside, it has Clooney at his best and partly to recall what actually happens for most of the films’ duration.

Adventureland

Does the thought of a bunch of Chris Ware-esque slackers, malcontents, navel-gazers, geeks, air-headed bimbos, losers, weirdos and general leftfield, left-behind types do it for you? Me either, really – these characters, in latterday cinema, tend to be sterotypes or ciphers, stick-on rent-a-whiners or just plain ridiculous. Mini Kurt Cobains in check shirts grumbling about their (normally not too shabby) lot or dopey girls that really belong in the latest Dawson’s Creek-alike but have been told to wear no make-up and look like they’ve got mild toothache.

In Adventureland, though, they all ring true and are at no point unlikeable, even the largely unlikeable ones. Adventureland being the fairground that Jesse Eisenberg stoops to in order to bankroll his college plans when his parents admit their finances are none too good. It’s a typical affair – con amusements and underpaid staff moping about, sharing misfortunes and anecdotes and dovetailing in and out of each others lives. What’s out of the ordinary is the fact that Kristen Stewart and Ryan Reynolds work here, the latter taking the former into his mother’s basement when the mood takes him. She likes Eisenberg, though, and a relationship kindles, threatening to go somewhere despite her reluctance and general discord (parent trouble). Reynolds drops a few rogue pieces of advice into chats with Eisenberg, Eisenberg pulls the cheerleader who fancies ‘normal guy for a change’, Eisenberg feels bad, Eisenberg gets wind of Reynolds mucking about with his beloved and it all goes sour, though not for long, obviously.

The last scene and shot are exactly right; the performances are perfectly underplayed and the musical touchstones and cinematography suitably evoke a time that never was but that you want to keep revisiting. Eisenberg is a slightly more winsome, appealing, humbly bumbling version of Michael Cera, Jon Heder is particularly wired but instantly endearing and Stewart is exceptional. Gregg Mottola deserves a great deal of credit for getting the balance between sunlit nostalgia and vitality right and the script is sharp but never arch; the gently disaffected protagonists are never submerged by the pervasive sense of summer nights long gone. Adventureland feels like a mish-mash of all the best contemporary indie comedy moments but stands alone as a teen film abundant with unassuming charm.