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Up in the Air is gorgeous and wondrous and intelligent and elegant and freshly funny and moving and exquisitely constructed and I beseech you to get off your sofa and go see it. I am so serious about this I will not only say it all over, I will say it all over in capitals followed by nine exclamation marks: GO SEE IT!!!!!!!!! Now, what more do you want me to do? Carry you to the cinema? Don’t be silly. But I will give you four more exclamation marks, a chevron and two pound signs: !!!!^££. More than this I cannot do.
Very briefly, because space, like cellulite, is always the enemy, Up in the Air is about Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a man whose job is to fire people when companies downsize and don’t have the heart to do it themselves. You may say he specialises in letting people go. He has two sisters but has never been involved in their lives. He has no home to speak of. He spends his life in hotels, on planes, in airports. His ambition is to rack up ten million air miles, ‘as only seven people have done that, less than have gone to the moon’. But he loves his life, sees no imperative to make personal ties, and understands every nuance of always being on the move. Never, for example, get caught behind old people at airport security because ‘they’re riddled with hidden metal’. Bingham should be a monster, I suppose, but this part was written for Clooney and only Clooney could make it happen sympathetically. You cannot help but love Clooney, whatever. He also does that adorable thing with the eyebrow. You know what I’m talking about, right?
We always know just where this film is going. We know that Bingham, rather like the Bill Murray character in Lost in Translation, is going to have to confront his own emptiness and acknowledge it in some way. We know this as sure as eggs is eggs and as sure as eggs is cellulite, once they’ve gone into a Victoria sponge, yum, yum, I’ll have another slice, thanks. But as co-written and directed by Jason Reitman, who totally pulled off the tricky Juno, and even trickier Thank You For Smoking, the plot’s twists are so delicious and the dialogue so inventively perfect it doesn’t matter a jot. Bingham’s emotionally detached life is disturbed by two women. One is Alex (Vera Farmiga), his female counterpart who also wants a casual relationship — ‘Think of me as yourself, but with a vagina,’ she tells him — and the other is Natalie (Anna Kendrick), the young efficiency expert whom he is forced to take under his wing, and who is very funny, without every knowing it. Although the film loses its nerve a little towards the end, and only swerves away from sentimentality in the nick of time, it manages to be a rom-com, a serious film about lives ruined by job loss — the fired employees are played by real people who have been made redundant — and something quite heartfelt about the importance of finding meaningful relationships in life. ‘Only connect,’ as E.M. Forster would have said. In fact, if Forster had been a frequent flyer with broadband, this is the movie he might have written.
And now, a quick word, if I may, about 44 Inch Chest, a Brit flick written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the pair who also wrote Sexy Beast. This stars Ray ‘TAKE THAT, YOU SLAG!’ Winstone as Colin, a cuckolded husband who kidnaps his wife’s lover and keeps him in a wardrobe while deciding what revenge to take. Joanne Whalley plays the wife. She is still hot (some of us just don’t fade) while John Hurt, Ian McShane, Tom Wilkinson and Stephen Dillane play Colin’s low-level, sleazy gangster mates. This isn’t a great film, and may be quite a bad one, with its self-conscious, Pinter-esque dialogue and a first act, but no real second or third ones. If this film intended to get somewhere, it didn’t make it. Or, if it did, I just didn’t notice. But, weirdly, I kind of enjoyed it — my dears, you have never seen such grandstanding — and I especially enjoyed Hurt’s performance, who appeared to be channelling Wilfred Bramble as Steptoe. I laughed quite a lot, possibly inappropriately, and should warn you that the expletives are torrential. A typical example is: ‘You are f***ing his wife you wife-f***ing, f***ing c**t.’ Even Tom Wilkinson does this, and he has always seemed like such a nice man. I don’t beseech you to see this in the least, but simply mention it in passing, and now I’m off for a lie-down. Beseeching is all very well on its own, as is not beseeching, but taken together they are extremely tiring, as you probably know. I don’t even have the energy left for an exclamation mark. Oh, go on then: !
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