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In case you haven’t received the memo from the mainstream film press, this is the movie that is bold enough to confront the current economic crisis and entertainingly attack it head-on. I guess simply referencing something going on in the culture counts as social commentary, much in the way Green Day's American Idiot was hailed as one of the most political albums of 2004.

Jason Reitman made a better film about a man with a cruel job in 2005 called Thank You For Smoking. In that movie I didn’t feel like my hand was being held every time something transformed or became heightened. With Up In The Air I didn’t feel like I was being told an interesting story as much as I was seeing scenes from what I imagine it’s like on my Uncle Herb’s corporate vacations. (Although if he’s hooking up with women like Vera Farmiga wearing only his necktie in hotel rooms a la George Clooney, then I’m going to have to actually remember to listen next time I ask him how his latest trek was).

It would’ve been nice if we had gotten to know Vera Farmiga’s character a little better. All we really know about her is that she has a healthy sex drive and travels a lot for a job that is never talked about. So we get a hot, horny businesswoman and Anna Kendrick, who plays George Clooney’s uptight, type-A personality partner. She wants to get married and be successful at her job. Gee, I wonder if both of these women will help change George Clooney’s outlook on life in their own separate ways?

We do get to know Clooney, however, and we find out he’s very happy with his life. Of course he can’t stay happy that way, with no mortgage-upside-down house and Baby Einstein products littered all over the kitchen floor. Someone has to come along and show him that 20 years of doing what makes him happy is actually bad. Who wants to be awesome at their job, get paid to travel around the country and sleep with pear-shaped beauties every week anyway?

I’d like to see a movie that focuses instead on the “settled down” and probes into why they have such a desire to see their single friends live like they do. What is it about the ego that drives people to try and make their friends into different versions of themselves? The last movie I remember (and I’m sure there are lots of examples that I forgot about) taking the opposite premise of “single people are secretly miserable” route somewhere interesting was About Schmidt. Jack Nicholson is a boring stiff going through the motions of elderly married life. He finally starts to experience life and feel things when his wife is no longer in his life.

Back to the economic part of the movie: it’s interesting that the main characters here are all successful, upper-middle class professionals whose jobs are not in danger at all, or who all have many options in case they were. All the people who get laid off might as well be billed as The Fat Guy, The Sassy Woman and The Dude With the Beard. Yes, unemployment exists and it’s unpleasant, but do we really have to spend more than a few minutes with them? Wouldn’t it be more fun to fly around in first-class with George Clooney?

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