Up in the Air

Many of the women I know stop breathing for an instant when George Clooney’s name comes up. He’s a classic ladies man in that gravelly-voiced, smooth-talking Clark Gable way, engaging and unattainable at the same time.

Many men are also smitten by Clooney, although they usually don’t stop breathing. He’s a classic man’s man in the Clark Gable style, a likeable rogue with a Teflon heart.

I get it but I really don’t get it. I know that Clooney wrote and directed Good Night and Good Luck, the powerful, spot-on, 2005 film about political courage during the witch hunts of the McCarthy era. But the guy always seemed like an empty suit to me, albeit one that is impeccably tailored and pressed. In movies like Syriana, Burn After Reading and Solaris he seems more a personality type than an actor, a demographic niche identified by focus groups, Tom Cruise, not Sean Penn.

All this changed when I saw Up in the Air in which Clooney delivers a nuanced, comic and truly moving performance. Was he always this good and I missed it, or is this something new? Doesn’t matter: I’m smitten now, too.

Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a man who travels around the country firing people. He’s the Music Man of termination, a sunny, inspirational hatchet man who prides himself on being professional (some would say clinically detached) with those about to be dispatched. If a terminee says she’s going to jump off a bridge, that’s not his problem; catching the next flight out is. Writer/director Jason Reitman takes the time to capture the pain and humiliation of people being unceremoniously thrown off the corporate bus, a poignant reminder of the millions who have lost their job since the financial meltdown.

Bingham is, of course, the kinder, gentler face of cold-blooded corporate masters who are even less interested in him than he is in his clients. His main squeeze outside work is amassing the cards and awards that open doors to higher status privileges for road warriors like him. His dream is to accrue the 10 million miles of air travel it takes to earn an elite card that has been by attained by only three other people in the history of the world. This is a natural for him because he feels more at home at 35,000 feet in the company of strangers than he does at home with himself.

The plot begins to bubble when Ryan meets a fellow business nomad named Alex (Vera Farmiga), a woman who tells him in so many words that she’s exactly like him except with a vagina. Can’t hope for much more than that. For perhaps the first time in his life, Ryan feels that he can be himself with someone, and it’s quite moving to see the valves of his heart flutter open a bit, revealing but then quickly covering up unexpected depths. It’s similar to what Bill Murray’s character did in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation but Clooney is more emotionally exposed. His heart is an uncirculated coin, never worn down in the commerce of life, unspent but also undamaged. He’s touchingly open to the possibility of love, not disillusioned beyond repair.

Meanwhile, Ryan’s company hires Natalie (Anna Kendrick), an edgy, cocksure young woman with a degree in psychology, who thinks people can be fired through teleconferencing. She’s the next big thing in impersonal HR, Bingham’s terminator. The big boss, Craig (Jason Bateman), smooth and removed like Bingham but domesticated, sends Ryan and Natalie out on the road together to field test the idea.

And so it goes. Jason Reitman’s film delivers a higher than average quality in-flight entertainment meal. I generally don’t like films that feel too carefully weighed and measured, audience tested, but I enjoyed this one because it was smart about it and moved deftly through its story. Up in the Air liberates Ryan’s inner Tom Hanks/Jimmy Stewart everyman, the part’s that’s gone missing from post-modern American life. It’s an easy watching reminder that our success as human beings is not based on what we do or what we have but who we are.

Avatar

Ding-dong, the flat old movie screen is dead. So sayeth writer/director James Cameron’s new movie, Avatar, the first feature ever filmed in High Definition 3D. No question, it nails the 3rd D, adding unprecedented depth to scenes. Unfortunately, it also shrinks its plot and characters to 1D, a departure from the darkly, richly layered films for which Cameron is justly celebrated: Terminator, Aliens, Abyss and Titanic.

.

Avatar is a cinematic platypus, improbable but fun to watch. It feels like Lord of the Rings in spirit and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain in concept with a story line somewhere between Last Samurai and Pocahontas. There’s more fantasy in Avatar than previous Cameron films and less sci-fi, more beating heart, less fevered chase. The looming apocalypse typically hogging center stage in Cameron films has been replaced by the magic of life. The Terminator has become Tinkerbelle.

JC conceived and built HD 3D technology for this film, his first since Titanic 10 years ago. In his hands it’s digital silly putty and the film bursts with the excitement of pure play. There are, for example, a seemingly endless supply of gigantic flying lizards colored like Japanese kites that serve as transit for the locals and mysterious sea polyp-like creatures that seem to swim in the air, quietly radiating benign intelligence. All this and much, much more keeps coming at you all the time from every possible angle, Pixar on steroids, basically.

Of course, IMAX has long delivered this kind of cinematic wow with the overwhelming force of its size and sound, and some truly amazing camera work. Ditto innovative CGI films such as Jurassic Park and King Kong. But HD 3D does something new: it comes right off the screen, seemingly close enough to touch. At times, it really made me feel like I was part of the movie. The characters and landscapes have a palpable gravity to them, more real and surreal at the same time, another small step towards holograms. Trippy, without ingesting any psychedelics. We can only hope that this powerful technology doesn’t fall into the hands of advertising executives or terrorists.

Oh, and then there’s a story, too. It goes something like this: a twenty-something Marine named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a likable, mid-22^nd Century paraplegic, signs up for a mission on the planet Pandora. He meets a young Na’vi woman with big, round Smurf eyes and cat-like features named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). She takes him under her wing, teaching him her people’s ways, and they fall in love. Meanwhile, Jake’s employer, an intergalactic mining corporation, is using his reconnaissance to blast and bulldoze the Na'vi off land which sits atop a rare mineral worth zillions back on earth.

And so it goes. The Na’vi live in peaceful, Native American-like harmony with their planet, a tropical paradise where nature is sacred and healing. The military people and their corporate masters are either shallow and cunning or mean spirited and cunning. They seem to live only to make obscene profit and bash the Na’vi. It’s a message you can’t miss even if you’re watching in 2D.

Near the end of the film, the Na’vi flee the advancing armies, gathering around a huge tree with drooping branches, entwining their hands with exposed root tendrils. It’s a kind of organic Internet link connecting them with each other and their planet. They chant and sway together, one people, one body, one planet, a Live Aid concert with set design by Apocalyto. In connecting this way, they start events in motion which ultimately rout the bad guys and save Pandora from destruction.

It’s a hokey but powerfully moving scene because it says something that Al Gore et.al. feel but cannot convey: Human beings are unconscious Terminators and we’ve got to wake up.

I hope that this scene becomes the Woodstock moment of the early 21^st Century, what Richie Haven’s Freedom was to the ‘60’s generation, a direction home.

It might work, given the film’s world-wide release and the star power of its messenger. Think about it: a guy who loves blowing stuff up and scaring us to death has morphed into a prince of peace, a sensitive poet of life’s miracles and wonders. If Cameron can make this transformation, rebalancing the earth’s overheated atmosphere should be a piece of cake. Maybe love will conquer all, after all, and that’s a consummation devoutly to be wished.