Awesome Movie Review: Up in the Air

I’m going to make this brief.  Up in the Air seems to be getting a lot of good press and that bothers me.  It bothers me because I believe the message of the film is fundamentally distasteful.  Now I enjoy a good George Clooney film as much as the next guy (I especially like it when George looks sexy and then smiles while looking down in a bit of faux-bashful sexiness) but Up in the Air is nothing more than bourgeois propaganda.

I won’t bother going into too much details as to the plot of the film.  All you really need to know is that George Clooney plays a man who, at the start of the film, is happy.  He enjoys his thankless job and his brutal travel schedule.  He is that rare person who is truly content with life.  But being content with life is not good enough for this film.  Oh no, it turns out that George Clooney is actually an empty shell of a man, living a life devoid of meaning.   Why is this so?  Because George Clooney is single.  Because George Clooney doesn’t have a wife, 2.5 children, a house with a white picket fence, or a life that resembles the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.  Sure, he’s happy, but according to writer/director/nepotism beneficiary Jason Reitman, being happy isn’t good enough.  In the world of Up in the Air, true happiness is secondary to social conformity.

Now some of you might be saying, “But Shawn, what’s wrong with having a loving family?”  While there’s nothing wrong with wanting to marry and raise children, the film posits that the family life is the only life worth living.  There’s even a montage of the unemployed telling how their families are the only things that keep them going.  Now I don’t have a wife or family, nor do I ever intend to, and I find it insulting that a filmmaker would imply that those without the skills to keep their jobs are somehow better than me, simply because I don’t have children and they do.  Just because I choose a solitary life, rather than overpopulating the earth with a quiverfull of gangly, ugly, nerd children, does not make me less of a man.  Nor does it mean that my life is empty or devoid of meaning and happiness.

Up in the Air is a direct slap in the face to me and others like me. To imply that happiness comes from family, rather than from doing what you love, is an ignorant, narrow-minded, and archaic way of looking at the world.  It’s 2010, we have only two more years until the Mayans rise from the grave to destroy us all, so why are the makers of Up in the Air, still clinging to Leave it to Beaver-era ideals?

Even with the looking-down-and-smiling charisma of George Clooney, Up in the Air has no appeal for me.  Some might like the idea of a happy man having that happiness snatched away from him because he can’t conform to clichéd notions of personal fulfillment, but I don’t.  On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give Up in the Air the dreaded Evil tiny head of Sergei Eisenstein.