Austin Film Festival Thursday
The final night ends on an appropriately existential note
Up In The Air
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It has often been said that the arts flourish in difficult times—at the multiplex, at least—and even though we’ve yet to see hard proof of that, Downtown Calling offers ample evidence that the old cliché definitely held true for New York City in the late ’70s and early ’80s.
These were the bad old days in the Big Apple, as far as Joe and Jane Citizen were concerned—a dark period of rampant crime and corruption that followed the infamous Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead,” long before Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani rode in on white steeds to rid the city of all its Times Square porn and troublesome squeegee men. For young aspiring artists and musicians, however, life could hardly have been better: Rent was cheap; punk, new wave, and hip-hop were all on the rise; and there was no shortage of abandoned buildings and subway cars to tag with colorful graffiti. Shan Nicholson’s film is not so much a documentary of this vibrant era as a total immersion in it—and for those who’ve long wished they could have been a part of the heyday of CBGB, the Mudd Club, and the Roxy, etc., it’s motivation to get busy on those time machines. Nicholson offers present-day interviews with original scenesters (including critic Nelson George, Talking Heads’ Chris Frantz, Fab Five Freddy, notorious party boy Koch) that provide, for the umpteenth time, a primer on the cultural cross-pollination that made the extremely picked-over era special, but it’s the plentiful new scenes from that seemingly inexhaustible store of vintage footage that make Downtown Calling the best party this year’s festival had to offer—and a reassuring argument that even the worst of times look like a hell of a lot of fun in retrospect.
Whether we’ll eventually feel the same way about our current recession-dominated era remains to be seen, of course, but when future generations look back on the films of 2009—judging by what we’ve seen this week, anyway—they will notice that, rather than channeling our economic uncertainty into outwardly confrontational art, we spent a lot of our time lost in existential hand-wringing and covering up our pain with gallows humor. As closing-night selection Up In The Air demonstrated, we’re not so much disenfranchised as depersonalized, lost in our own mordant reveries even when surrounded by other people—which is what makes Ryan Bingham, George Clooney’s corporate executioner (he swoops in to fire employees for bosses who can’t face the drama of doing it themselves), an ideal character for our times. He’s permanently adrift, spending 322 days of the year swooping through Admirals’ Club lounges and hotel suites and chasing his greatest goal in life: achieving 10 million frequent flyer miles. For a guy who’s essentially a phantom presence, Bingham is a real people person who can make getting canned sound like emancipation; he’s a mirror image of Aaron Eckhart from Thank You For Smoking, another Jason Reitman protagonist whose chief weapon is his own bullshit (though Clooney’s natural, crinkly eyed charm makes his smooth-talker considerably less smug). That all-important amiable touch is why Bingham finds it so insulting when his boss (an unfortunately underdeveloped Jason Bateman) decides to cut back on costs himself and implement a new Skype-like firing “interface” suggested by twentysomething go-getter Natalie (Anna Kendrick).
Much of Up In The Air revolves around this divide of old versus new, as Bingham is forced to drag Natalie along and show her that the sleeker, faster way of doing things isn’t always best. Their generational tête-à-tête plays out against a montage of dozens of employees—many of whom, as Reitman revealed in his Q&A, were actual people who had been laid off last year, mixed in with ringers like AFF ’09 MVPs Zach Galifianakis and J.K. Simmons—getting the news that their decades of service are no longer required, thanks to the same bottom-line restructuring that threatens Bingham’s way of life. Along the way, Bingham meets another permanent itinerant—“Just think of me as you with a vagina,” she says at one point—in Alex (Vera Farmiga), another status-chaser who shares Bingham’s belief that stasis equals death. Their breezy, prolonged seduction and easy chemistry (having proved that she can tango with both Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon in The Departed and now George Clooney, we declare that Farmiga deserves to be a household name) gives the film its requisite romance, but it’s one that’s equally modern and removed: They exchange flirtatious text messages and arrange dates using airport acronyms, while Alex at one point admits that she Googled Bingham because “that’s what modern girls do when we have a crush.” Their tenuous love comes laden with boundaries that keep it from getting too serious (and when it finally does, it’s a minor disaster), and this, too, clashes with the younger Natalie’s more old-fashioned life plan of career/marriage/kids. It also starts to ring unexpectedly hollow for Bingham himself when he invites Alex to his sister’s wedding, and the guy she’s marrying (a frustratingly subdued Danny McBride) unintentionally forces Bingham to finally confront his own loneliness.
As Reitman articulated in his post-screening talk, Up In The Air is about what happens when you recognize that loneliness, and what you do when you look around and realize that you’re halfway through your life without a solid connection to anything. (Quick tangent: Lest you think it was all pseudo-profound pontificating, Reitman is genuinely one of the funniest directors to ever grace the Austin Film Festival, full of honest, self-deprecating anecdotes and odd trivia tidbits, like the fact that the father of Up In The Air’s aerial photographer designed the Ghostbusters logo.) It’s an existential question common to many of the films we saw this week, from Precious to Punching The Clown to The Vicious Kind to even The Road; judging by AFF ’09, these are inordinately tough times for everyone, and obviously we’ve all got a lot of thinking to do. But as sick as we became of the “heartbreaking yet hopeful” sentiment expressed in various press releases and all those vaguely sky-is-falling industry panels, if there’s one lesson we can take away—not only from Up In The Air, but from this entire week—it’s that we just have to focus on what matters most to us, and above all keep moving, whether we’re sexually abused teenagers, cannibal-dodging apocalypse survivors, or just everyday middle-class white people watching our jobs slip away and our families grow further apart. And of course, it would help if we didn’t take everything so fucking seriously.
