"Up in the Air" Not So Much Like "Up in the Air"

Are you like one of those people who worry about whether the zeitgeist has been adequately captured for a particular time and place? Especially a time and place that you and everyone you know is currently experiencing? If so then I encourage you to see the theatrical version of "Up in the Air" -- "based" on the novel by Walter Kirn. Director / adaptor-to-film Jason Reitman contrived, as far as I can tell, a completely new story, using many of the same characters from Kirn's novel and vaguely similar plot points but that's where the parallels end.

I'm not a purist or, much worse, a fan boy. I don't need to be told the same story in order to enjoy it. I just think in the case of "Up in the Air" the spirit of the novel was lost to something 1) more immediately accessible to mainstream audiences and 2) egregiously schmaltzy and cloying in a way that uses stentorian terms requiring no discernment, like: "THIS IS REALITY AND THESE ARE THE REAL PEOPLE HARMED BY IT, AMERICA!" Does Reitman do some interesting things with these tropes that are as new to cinema as Frank Capra and his populist stories of the '30s and '40s? Yes, he does demonstrate that things are not always as easy as they may seem at first blush, and he isn't necessarily going to give the audience what they want, but he will give them something close to that.

"Thank You For Smoking" his first major success wasn't exactly a firebrand of controversy when it hit theaters in 2005. By that time the whole notion of smoking as an unconscionable vice was pretty well established, not to imply that was specifically what Reitman and company meant to showcase. Maybe Reitman was sad because he missed the zeitgeist as smoking goes, and wanted something that would make up for it. If so he really took Kirn's novel and ran with it, and contorted it while he ran with it, contorting it into something perplexingly easy. My problem is the book made a lot of the same points as the film, but better. Without hammering you over the head with the fact that Ryan Bingham's life as a nomadic traveler of the airways fails to fulfill the book achieved the same effect. In the end of the novel, Ryan Bingham is seated with Soren Morse, the CEO of Great West Airlines, Bingham's airline of choice. Bingham has just surpassed his monomaniacal objective of 1 million frequent flier miles (in the film it's 10 million, you figure adjusted for inflation and everything's bigger on screen) and discovers himself to be just as empty as he'd been before, just with 1 million frequent flier miles instead of without. A crescendo moment in his conversation with Morse goes like this:

"My miles go to children's hospitals," I say.

"That's great. What a gesture. We should get this out. I'll contact press relations when we land. You're serious?"

"Don't use my name. No name. It's not a gesture. It's barely charity. I'm sick myself; I can't use them anyway. Plus, I've been everywhere you people fly."

To be clear, this is not the conversation Clooney's Bingham has with the plane's captain (Sam Elliott, and his being the captain instead of the CEO is another departure from the novel I had no qualms with) when he achieves his objective of 10 million in the end. The substance is similar but the self-loathing is lost. The lack of any place left to go is lost. There is too much sugar coating the movie "Up in the Air." Perhaps that is why it struck me as deeply dishonest and flawed.

After seeing "Fantastic Mr. Fox" it was hard to watch George Clooney return to his standard, playing the character Ryan Bingham in his usual manner, essentially the same as in Oceans 11 through 13. Bingham a la Clooney is charming and guileful, with a little more of his ribald touch that has been evidenced better by him in better movies like "Burn After Reading" and "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?" And the effort to make him a little ribald in the end seems to me to be the point of including the character Natalie Keener, played to good effect by Anna Kendrick -- even if I found her role to be very typical. She did well with limited material. In fact my favorite scene in the entire film involves her firing via computer a man in a Detroit office, which is easily the most moving, emotionally jarring part of the film, and her unnatural-to-her-character stoicism and unfeeling is nicely executed here, as we the audience know she is dying inside.

I wouldn't have as much of a problem with "Up in the Air" were in not for the fact that everyone, critics of all strips and audiences alike, seem to think it is deserving of a Best Picture Oscar, Reitman has achieved something great and that George Clooney somehow outdoes himself, all of which are praise I'm at a loss to understand. I even found the inclusion of the real people who'd been fired to be disjointing and misplaced, and even vaguely exploitative -- less of an effort to truly showcase the humanity that is discarded callously by our system and more to trot them out like animals on parade, in part because their stories aren't adequately told. We in the audience simply understand that they are "real" because it's a point that's been highly publicized about the film, and there they are, talking in pithy, generic lines you'd expect of someone who's been recently fired, maybe about what actually befell them, maybe not.

I know that I disagree this film is good. It is a C-, no better. That's what I think.

Brief Thoughts on a Novel I Read: Mission to America

I'm not exactly sure what first got me interested in the works of Walter Kirn. I'm pretty sure whatever it was had something to do with the forthcoming release of the film adaptation of his novel, "Up in the Air," which is looking disappointingly more and more like a George Clooney vehicle and less like something I'll have any interest in seeing. I'm not saying the book and the movie have to be one and the same in terms of plot and all other points attributable, but I am concerned about how close to the original spirit of the novel they'll be able to stay with the invented protege, Natalie, necessarily adding new dynamic and dimension to the story's main character, Ryan Bingham. And yes, it's true, maybe they don't wish to stay close to the novel's original spirit, or even in the same ballpark. They're doing something different, creative license invoked. Fine, their prerogative. In that case, mine remains to grouse from afar until my suspicions have been confirmed or disconfirmed, then grouse some more, regardless.

But as for Walter Kirn and his oeuvre, I can say in the year to date I've managed to read "Up in the Air," "Thumbsucker" and most recently "Mission to America." And you bet I'm glad I have. Since I said in the title something about this being "brief" thoughts on a novel recently completed, I'm going to write only about "Mission to America" and try to be brief. Kirn appears to have some interest in fringe religious groups, evident in Justin Cobb's conversion to Mormonism in "Thumbsucker" and seen again with the far more obscure (and entirely a product of Kirn's imagination) church of the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles in "Mission to America." The novel is written in the first-person narrative of Mason LaVerle, a young AFA missionary assigned the task, along with five other young men deemed similarly fit, of going off into America (or Terrestria) and diversifying and repopulating the dwindling AFA membership, wholly extant in the small town of Bluff, Montana.

Like the recent Thomas Pynchon novel "Inherent Vice" there is a pervasive attitude espoused principally by LaVerle that America has made a mockery of its divine (or at least spiritual) opportunity made manifest at its inception, and is descending instead to the slow depths of cultural dyspepsia, a land of the identity-less and devoid of any vision of where to go to reclaim itself -- our vices are too many, our concerns too vapid and trivial, our unrest too past the point of return. That's not to say LaVerle doesn't come off similarly wayward and misguided, or plainly brainwashed by his very insular community. He believes strongly in his faith, although at times more strongly than at others, and calls upon the "All-in-One," the spiritual essence of the universe, more or less, which has the unusual if not useful quality of being everything to everyone without limitations. This becomes rather muddled and contradictory as the story progresses, like in this conversation between LaVerle and his budding love interest, Betsy, who explains how she earns her living by cornering the market for retro clothing by buying it up from every thrift store and yard sale within hundreds of miles:

The problem is when the stuff is gone it's gone, though, so I really can't take the time to sell it off until I've got most of what's out there.

You think that's possible?

I can feel it -- you're about to preach, she said. Yes, I know, it's no substitute for God. It's stuff. It's only stuff.

That's what the All-in-One is made of, actually.

Not spirit?

That, and everything else.

I don't believe the notion of the All-in-One is intended to be entirely specious or farcical. There is something completely idealistic about the inclusionary spirit it evokes. It's a religion that turns tradition on its head by conforming to matriarchal rule and a general veneration and deference to women. It eschews the plasticity of modern life whenever this action is practical but goes no further than that in its day-to-day societal mechanisms. In other words, there are numerous relations with the outside world, and although it's rare that the people of Bluff venture beyond their town's limits it is not prohibited. Still, by the novel's end even Bluff has lost its momentum and has been compromised by the outside. Its faithful aspire to the same amenities that have come to define modern American society: stylish automobiles, expansive mansions, and worst of all, validation from the outside, which seems to precipitate the need for a mission to America in the first place. So that in the end, it's not the faith that fails but the people.

All right, so I said I'd be brief right? Well, I lied. Good night and BAD luck! (I'm a petty, petty man)