Only connect

The team behind “Up in the Air” have done a very sly job of making the film alternately ubiquitous and invisible this season, as paradoxical as that sounds.

For us bloggers, the film seems to have been around for ages — indeed, it’s nearly three months since its Telluride premiere, an eternity in awards-campaign terms. Yet, conscious of the dangers of overhype, the film has been held back after that initial buzz-burst, garnering goodwill at select subsequent screenings, but largely ceding the publicity spotlight to the likes of “Precious.”

Now, with the film finally opening to the public this Friday, the media assault begins afresh, with two extensive profiles of writer-director Jason Reitman appearing yesterday in the flagship papers of both coasts. David Carr’s NYT interview and Rachel Abramowitz’s LA Times piece overlap a fair amount, though Carr’s takes the cute route of meeting Reitman in an airport, allowing for a more pointed reflection on the film’s themes of physical and personal statelessness.

Both pieces, however, provide a good platform for Reitman to underline his strong personal affinity for the story he’s telling, attaching more of a directorial identity to the film than he was credited with on his previous work. Abramowitz’s piece looks to Reitman’s father Ivan to draw a connection between the 32 year-old filmmaker and George Clooney’s protagonist Ryan Bingham, despite the apparent lack of common points between them:

Bingham’s vision of a commitment-free life is weirdly entrancing, he explains, even to someone like him, who has basically had two long monogamous relationships and is now happily married with a child. “I have no fear of settling down, no fear of connecting,” Reitman says. “I have a job where I can do exactly what I want to do, and I have days where I want to be completely unplugged from everyone. I want to live in a city where I know no one and have nothing. Why am I exhilarated by that?”

“I think there’s something about the isolation and loneliness of the Clooney character that resonates for him,” says his father, Ivan Reitman, the ’80s comedy titan who directed such films as “Stripes” and “Ghostbusters” and produced “Up in the Air.” “This leads to the ‘lone warrior’ thing, particularly if you’re a young man in his late 20s or 30s.”

This strikes me as an interesting point to make, given that Reitman actually upped Bingham’s age from early-30s in Walter Kirn’s source novel to 40-something in the film, making it a more overt mid-life narrative.  Yet the film does seem to resonate with a number of men in the age group that Reitman Sr. mentions, perhaps because the older Bingham’s story in the film reads more as a cautionary tale on the dangers of detachment.

In Carr’s interview, meanwhile, Reitman expounds on the simultaneous virtues and perils of the homogenized, technologically-enabled “Airworld” that the film puts under the microscope:

“All the airports kind of feel and look the same now …  All the things that you want are there, so you can land anywhere, and you feel at home. You’re given the sense that you’re everywhere, but you’re nowhere; that you are constantly with your community, yet you have no community. There’s kind of a terrific irony to that.”

“Technology works the same way. Things like Facebook have made you feel as though you’re connected to everybody,” he said, indicating his iPhone. “You’ve got a thousand friends on Facebook, but you don’t actually talk to anybody. You’re not close to anybody.”

Though both interviews also allude to the film’s zeitgeist-reflecting themes of economic downturn and unemployment, this focus on more abstract individual concerns chimes in with another LA Times piece, which discusses the marketing challenges posed by such a downbeat film on a subject that might hit a little too close to home for many viewers in the current climate.

The answer, writes Claudia Eller, has been to sideline the film’s corporate subject matter, while highlighting Bingham’s more hopeful personal rehabilitation:

Instead, in selling the movie, Paramount is emphasizing Bingham’s journey of self-discovery, his existential isolation as a corporate consultant who lives out of his suitcase and off an expense account.

“At its heart, the movie is about making human connections,” said Josh Greenstein, Paramount’s co-president of marketing. “That’s so relevant in the world we live in today, where, with Twitter and e-mail, people communicate without being face-to-face.”

To make that point, the poster for the movie features Clooney standing at an airport terminal staring out the window, with the tag line: “The story of a man ready to make a connection.”

More here.