Review of Up in the Air (2009) by Mikeg. — 16 Jan 2010

What a difficult movie to grade. Everything was done "right": the performances were magnificent (though it's Anna Kendrick, not George Clooney, who delivers the best performance), the jokes were funny, and the characters and story were propped up by an extremely strong script.

The problem the movie had is that it delivered an interesting, compelling story in the first two thirds of the movie before falling back on conventional Hollywood narrative for the last third. For a movie this well written, you can't quite call it treacle, but for a movie that was shooting for such lofty heights, it felt like a swing and a miss.

There's a lot of critical love for Up in the Air, but in the end there's something missing from this package. What starts as an intriguing look into the construct of what makes for a "good" life goes off the rails and becomes nothing more than the usual moralizing about how there is a right way and a wrong way to live.

Don't be fooled by what some are calling an "unconventional" ending. The movie isn't a masterpiece because the ending insists on winners and losers instead of allowing for the gray areas that were apparent throughout most of the film.