Is Up in the Air the first movie about the Great Recession? Because I’ll tell you what. Whether or not the movie succeeds for you largely depends upon how charming you find George Clooney, how sexy you find Vera Farmiga, how adorable you find Anna Kendrick, and how glorious you find cameos from Sam Elliott. I enjoy Clooney, Farmiga is very sexy (although: Permission to speak freely? Bummer about the body double), Kendrick is indeed adorable (and quite talented–she’s been one of the highlights of the Twilights), and Sam fucking Elliott, man. Even though Jason Reitman’s directorial choices are usually strictly functional, and when they’re not (as in the flyover-view credits sequence) they overstay their welcome, there’s more to a movie than that: These folks are fun to spend time around, and that’s a big part of what can make a good movie–just the pleasure of sitting in front of people whose voices and smiles and faces draw you in. So I enjoyed it even if I rarely was blown away by its “Fight Club and Office Space: Ten Years Later” take on soul-crushing corporate culture. Except when, repeatedly, it put you right there in the room with men and women being fired. The level of unemployment and underemployment in this country right now is, frankly, nightmarish, and the inattention paid to it versus the daily Dow Jones rollercoaster is scandalous, and the culture that spawned it is a form of sociopathy. Speaking as someone who was laid off twice before he turned thirty, and has seen it happen to his wife and around three-quarters of his closest friends, I think people devastated by the fear, grief, and shame of losing your job so that your bosses can make more money need to be shown in cineplexes nationwide over and over again until they’re at least as much a part of our national pop-cultural conversation as billionaire superheroes and gorgeous young urban professionals who need to learn something about love.
