Up in the Air
Directed by Jason Reitman. Written by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on the novel by Walter Kirn. With George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, Danny McBride, and Zach Galifianakis. (R)
There's a moment in Jason Reitman's Up in the Air that hits like ice water, and it changes everything. Most importantly, it takes what until then had been a somewhat offbeat but largely familiar formula and throws it out the window, leaving its audience unsettled and adrift.
That's a description that could equally apply to Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), an axe man for hire who travels the country firing employees when a company can't do its own dirty work. On the road over 300 days a year, he has become a master of living a life in motion: he packs his carry-on with the studied grace of an assassin dismantling his weapon, and is a student of airport psychology who looks for Asians in the security lanes because "they pack light and have a thing for slip-on shoes."
It's the sort of tip that he passes on to Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a young upstart who plans to reshape Bingham's job by introducing termination by videochat. By his math, it means a week of his life saved from tedium; to Natalie, it's a sign of an antisocial disorder. Thrown together on a final firing spree by their boss (Jason Bateman), the pair travel the Midwest, forging a trail of tears while Bingham tries to introduce some human messiness into Natalie's ordered life. During filming, Reitman put it out that he was making a documentary, and many of the people we see getting laid off are non-actors drawn from the ranks of the unemployed. It's a well-meaning touch, but it doesn't quite work; we're constantly knocked between fiction and fact in a way that serves the film's politics more than its story.
Between firings, Bingham finds a kindred soul in road-warrior Alex (Vera Farmiga), a no-strings-attached blonde he meets in a hotel bar. Over drinks, they empty their wallets to compare courtesy cards and frequent flyer miles—"that's sexy," she purrs, on finding that he possesses a particularly coveted membership. This is their flirting, with keycards as plumage. Farmiga is a great actress, and as Alex and Ryan arrange it so their itineraries intersect, she makes us believe both in the coolness that keeps her detached and the warmth that ultimately makes Bingham consider settling down—a balancing act that's no easy feat. In short, her Alex is a person instead of just a character, and her relationship with Ryan has all the small joys and boredoms of any other, which is the movie's greatest strength, joy, and sorrow.
Still, there's that icy moment, and in the end Reitman (Thank You for Smoking) isn't soft enough to give everyone what most movies would. But life is messy, and that, mostly, is what makes living and our stories of life so interesting.
*
Daybreakers
Written and directed by Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig. With Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Claudia Karvan, Michael Dorman, and Jay Laga'aia. (R)
There's a movie out right now about a good-looking young vampire named Edward. Unlike most vampires, he doesn't feed on humans—in fact, he kind of has a thing for a human girl, and spends an awful lot of time protecting her from other vampires. When he's not doing that, he broods. Handsomely.
Twilight, you say? Nope, Daybreakers.
It's easy to poke fun at what has quickly become an overstuffed, overripe genre, but the truth is that Daybreakers, for all its ridiculousness, at least offers some moments of real fright. With a visual style that draws on the classic sci-fi of Blade Runner, the Spierig brothers' story is a bloody tale that touches on everything from factory farming (of humans, in this case) to the military-industrial complex. It also has exploding corpses.
Ethan Hawke stars as hematologist Edward Dalton, a scientist charged with creating a synthetic blood capable of sustaining Earth's vampire population. The result of a decade-old infection, vampirism is the new normal; humans are growing scarce, and without their blood, the new race will die out. Or will they? Dalton stumbles across a human colony whose leader Elvis (Willem Dafoe) is a "cured" vampire; the majority of the film concerns Dalton's race to derive a wider vaccine from Elvis' experience. Trying to stop him is Charles Bromley—a well-cast Sam Neill as the CEO who stands to make a fortune selling synthetic blood.
Daybreakers isn't likely to find a wide audience—and with its tired, by the numbers third act, that's probably for the best—but it's worth a look for anyone interested in sci-fi/horror crossovers.
*
With the sometimes myopic coverage of local media, it can be easy to forget that the Pioneer Valley extends far beyond the well-traveled Northampton-Amherst corridor—even if you happen to write a column about the Valley's film scene. That's my only explanation for overlooking the month-long Film Noir Festival at the Greenfield Garden Cinemas. (Proactive presenters are always welcome to send me press releases at the address that appears at the end of this column.) After screening a classic noir every Tuesday in January—I missed Touch of Evil!—the series wraps up this week with the 1941 Bogart mystery The Maltese Falcon. The 6 p.m. show is a steal at just five dollars.
Also in Franklin County this week, Shelburne Falls based Pothole Pictures brings a classic pirate story to the screen at Memorial Hall when it hosts the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty this Friday and Saturday night. Of the many adaptations of the the Nordoff-Hall novel, it's this version—starring a larger than life Charles Laughton as the cruel Captain Bligh, and Clark Gable as the man who leads the mutinous crew—that is most fondly remembered, despite Marlon Brando's 1962 effort, itself noted mostly for the on-set antics of its egomaniacal star. The story—a true one, more or less—seems made for film. The HMS Bounty was dispatched to Tahiti in 1787 on a mission to transport breadfruit plants to Britain's holdings in Jamaica. After a troubled voyage—flogging the crew being a favorite pastime of Bligh's—the ship arrived at the island paradise, and first mate Fletcher Christian (Gable) began to wonder why they should ever leave. As always at Pothole Pictures shows, the film will be preceded by live music on the Memorial Hall stage starting at 7 p.m. Friday night brings the "literate rock" of local favorites The Ambiguities, while The Doug Johnson Band performs original country and folk songs on Saturday. For more information, call (413) 625-2896.
Finally, PBS staple Dr. Wayne Dyer's "Wishes Fulfilled" comes to West Springfield's Showcase Cinema on 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 28. While not my cup of tea—I think he doles out more baloney than a cheap deli—there's no denying that he puts butts in the seats. For fans and followers, the press release promises that "during this 'Spiritual Workshop,' Dr. Dyer will reveal how the ancient wisdom of the Tao Te Ching helped him shift from ambition to a new kind of meaningful consciousness in this empowering exploration of the dynamics of our thought process." Don't forget your mustard.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
