Reviews: Up In The Air; 44 Inch Chest; Still Walking and All About Steve

Up In The Air (4/5)
(Jason Reitman) 15A
44 Inch Chest (1.5/5)
(Malcolm Vinville) 18
Still Walking (4/5)
(Hirokazu Koreeda) IFI Club
All About Steve (1/5)
(Phil Traill) 12A

Up In The Air, the new seriocomedy from Juno director Jason Reitman, is a movie about coming back down to earth. The story, adapted from Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, is a familiar one: its backdrop is the boulevard of broken dreams of the past two years. Which is another way of saying this is a recession film. Which it is, though it comes with the Chesire grin of George Clooney, a man so smooth he could make the words ‘you’ve just lost your job’ sound like melted butter.
This is what Clooney’s Ryan Bingham does. He flies around America firing employees for a firm that is hired by craven employers. (His boss, played by Jason Bateman, can’t hide his glee. “It is one of the worst times in America. This is our moment!”) We meet a parade of faces throughout the film, ordinary Joes and Joanettes faced with the dire news. And Clooney’s voice seems to have adapted for the role. Its smoothness has deepened. He now speaks like a velvet shag pile rug. You can imagine naked women throwing themselves on top of it.
As with all Clooney characters, there is that silken smugness. But what makes this one of his finest roles is the way he allows the film to ruffle him up, to scrape against his own gloss. When he isn’t lounging in airports, or jetting his way towards his target of 10 million air miles, Ryan gives motivational speeches about being on your own. “Let everything burn and imagine waking up tomorrow with nothing. It’s kind of exhilarating, isn’t it?” he preaches. He is a man with no ties, no family, no loyalty but to loyalty cards. He makes his life look like bliss, so wrapped up is he in his own self-denial.
This is unpicked delicately by two women. The first is Vera Farmiga’s Alex, another frequent high flyer. They exchange glances in an airport bar and soon they’re swapping loyalty cards (and cheek cells) like corporate soul mates. The moment reminds you of Patrick Bateman eyeing up business cards in American Psycho, and there is similar satire at work here: Reitman’s eye is cross-haired on the business class. He wants to know what it is like to be human in the midst of the inhuman. The world here is the colour of corporate: all drained blues. Laptops are put together to arrange a next date. On an airplane, Ryan is confronted by an air hostess with a soft drink on a tray. “Do you want the cancer?” she asks him. “What?” he asks. The film depicts the modern world as a kind of disease, eating away at what we call life.
Reitman captures Ryan’s slick travel routine with some neat editing: his slim suitcase is zipped, zapped and swizzled. And though Reitman’s style is clean and sharp, he doesn’t seek to break boundaries with his camera. Instead, he chips away at American pieties – notably the foundation myth about work and wealth creation. Reitman journeys towards what we might call real values: the gravity of family. But he’s not a sentimentalist and does not shy from disappointment.
It comes to weigh upon the face of Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a new employee at Ryan’s firm. She hits the job like a hurricane, with the naïve surety of an Ivy League grad. She spends her time doing up a flow chart on how to fire people, and pioneers a technique for terminating careers over the internet that would take Ryan off the road. Kendrick, a snappy young actress with a film future in the bag, begins to take on the weight of real life when she goes out on the road, meeting people face to face.
The film bubbles with gentle humour and there is a welcome complexity to Reitman’s characters. In some ways, he slots into the slipstream of director Alexander Payne, sharing the same quiet purpose. His eye is attracted to the incongruities of modern life and the grand failures of our small affairs. And he underlines without needing a bold pen. His theme is starting to look like disappointment.
In Juno, the heroine went through an entire film to learn that life doesn’t match our idealism. Here, Reitman shorthands that journey for Natalie in an amusing scene where, holding Ryan and Alex captive in an airport lounge, she bombards them with the entire outline of her dream man, all of which she has realised is a fiction. Ryan, too, comes to realise his life is a digression, a “parenthesis” in fact, and Clooney’s face sags with real ache, the Chesire grin wiped from his lips. I can’t imagine being called anything worse than that.
There’s a lot of name-calling in 44 Inch Chest, a film that swaggers like some kind of sexy beast. If only it were Sexy Beast. Screenwriters Louis Mellis and David Scinto, who wrote Jonathan Glazer’s terrific Brit gangster flick, pair up again, while two of that film’s cast return in the shape of Ray Winstone and Ian McShane. Meanwhile, Ben Kingsley, whose explosive Don Logan made one of the great on-screen nasties, is exchanged for John Hurt, which is much like exchanging a stick of dynamite for a glass of brandy.
Winstone plays Colin, a burl of a man with eyes like black holes. He has just been cuckolded by a pretty-boy waiter and his response, along with his pals, is to kidnap the fella, tie him to a chair in a warehouse and shout at him, with the plan to kill him. In Brit gangster fashion, the men spend their time calling each other c**ts. Though the most ridiculous line falls to Stephen Dillane’s Archie, who unloads this mouthful into the ear of the gagged and bound hostage: “You f**ked his f**king wife you f**king wife f**ker”. Indeed. One would presume, then, that the f**king f**ker is f**king f**ked. Or is he?
In Sexy Beast, the violence was viscerally verbal. Its alpha male stand-off was as tense as any murderous heist movie. 44 Inch Chest wants to play the same game but ends up a boob. The script is over-stuffed and its verbal violence is spread evenly, rather than given focus in just one nasty character. It slugs it out on screen with the balletic poise of Bluto then pauses every five minutes to give us a lumbering anecdote, much like a Guy Ritchie movie but without the pyrotechnics. It feels like a stage play. First-time director Malcolm Vinville makes it look like a stage play too.
Japanese writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda nods at Ozu’s towering Tokyo Story and updates it in Still Walking, making family life in modern Japan that little bit more complicated. What if some of the grown-up kids want to spend time with their parents but find it difficult? What if the parents are a pain to behold?
Here, retired patriarch Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) is an isolated, petty, childish man, while granny Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) is seemingly benign but quite the bitter slice – she bad-mouths her kids behind their backs. Koreeda kindly offers them a reasonable excuse: their eldest son drowned 15 years ago. Old age is seen to embitter rather than soften. Chinami (Japanese cult figure YOU) and her husband and kids smile at the pernicious parents, while Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) and his wife and stepson walk on eggshells. From plot particulars to some waist-height camera shots and pillow shots of passing trains, there are plenty of references to Ozu’s film. Koreeda’s script, which takes place over a day, is carefully observed and the dysfunction is shaped on screen with rare grace.
All about Steve, a Sandra Bullock comedy, should be basted and roasted upside down in the oven. Whatever reputation Bullock had left as a comedian is cooked. She plays Mary Horowitz, a crossword puzzle writer and simpering irritant who can’t find a man because, basically, she’s deranged. Her calling card is a pair of shiny red boots, so annoyingly bright, you begin to hope she’ll meet a bull and be gored magically off screen. Instead, she spends the film chasing after Steve, a TV cameraman who meets her for a blind date and spends the rest of the film running away from her. He’s played by Bradley Cooper, an actor in demand now after The Hangover and surely cursing his luck that this deeply unfunny film, made in 2007 but sitting on a shelf till now, ever got a release.