In his three edgy comedy/dramas,
Canadian born writer/director Jason Reitman has displayed a sure knack for
summoning feisty chemistry between characters from different generations. In Thank
You for Smoking a brazenly charming tobacco lobbyist gives his teenage son a
hands on lesson in political spin-doctoring; in Juno a very pregnant
high school girl enables a frustrated adult woman to achieve motherhood while
learning how to slip back into a far more innocent role with her own
cute-as-pudding track star boyfriend. In Reitman’s latest, Up in the Air,
a guy who fires people for a living, while spending as much time as he can
living sans family and other nettlesome human bonds, enables a smarty-pants
management trainee to open her eyes to the true cost of seeing other people as
excess baggage.
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In a career that has thus far
featured no significant queer characters, in Up in the Air, Reitman does
deliver a very bracing mentoring moment where the junior executive to be,
Natalie (Rocket Science’s Anna Kendrick, last seen nailing a stuttering
protégé with the line, “I upped your game, little man!”), gets relationship
advice from Ryan (the world’s most charming leading guy George Clooney) and his
frequent flier fuck buddy, Alex (the silky smooth Vera Farmiga). Just dumped by
her Omaha boyfriend (by text message, no less), Natalie breakdowns in a airport
checkout line. The girl who wants to fire people via the Internet, can’t take
the super competitive Alex’s advice that there’s no perfect guy in her future,
that all a career woman can hope for is a man who earns more than she does and
is healthy enough to play with his kids.
“Wow! That’s depressing. Couldn’t
we just date women?”
“Tried it -- we’re no picnic
ourselves.”
Reitman -- whose Hollywood dad,
Ivan, sports an intimidating resume: producer of the John Belushi comedy
classic Animal House and director of the 80’s smash hit Ghostbusters –
was taken aback when I quizzed him about LGBT characters in his films. “I’m
suddenly very embarrassed. I’m going to have to work on that.” Reitman did have
a nifty comeback. “I have played a gay character. In college I played Jeffrey
in Jeffrey.”
Turns out it was an odd career
defining moment for this obviously headed for the picture business kid:
seventeen, a freshman at Skidmore College, the memory is still a bit raw but
not for the reasons you might expect. “Honestly, the thing I realized most is
that I am an awful actor! Kissing guys was easy, the hard part was knowing how
bad I was every second. Jeffrey has all these monologues – the director
re-envisioned it where I had to sing on stage. I’m (still) mortified as to how
bad I was.”
Reitman concedes this mortification
gave him a leg up in working with screen actors – his films are a cornucopia of
authentic turns from Clooney, Farmiga, Kendrick, Ellen Page and the almost
angelically, but true to life sweet Michael Cera.
“Like most people I don’t have
whatever that thing is that allows you to go on camera, be yourself and connect
to people. I was never in character for a moment – ‘Just twenty-seven lines
left, I’m almost off stage. Wow! I’m really miserable up here!’”
A remarkable device contributing to
the empathy audiences feel for people getting the axe is that in all but one
case the fired are played by actual jobless persons, who say what they said in
the real moment, or wished they had the wit to say. An exception is Reitman
regular J.K. Simmons, who just knocks the ball out of the park as a just fired
dad – Simmons shows his character’s kids’ pictures like cards caged from a good
poker hand – who the smooth as silk Cooney has to verbally massage.
In the considerable time it took to
get his adaptation of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel to the screen, mass unemployment
lost some of its potential for gallows humor. There are several scenes where
Ryan gives Natalie a reality check about the fallout when the newly fired let
loose. Natalie races out of the building in a panic when a steely-eyed African
American woman blandly announces that she’s going to kill herself.
“People say these things all the
time. They seldom do it.”
“How do you know? Do you follow up
on them?”
“Nothing good would come from
that. Natalie, we take people at their most vulnerable and set them adrift.”
I told Reitman that Up in the
Air could have been a bitter, corrosive satire, like Billy Wilder’s acidic
spoof of 50’s tabloid journalism, Ace in the Hole.
“If I wanted a dark satire
I could have approached the economy in a funnier way – I wanted to make a movie
about human connections and for that it needed to be more real.” Reitman say
the real people who contribute cameos in the movie were paid for their stories
and made members of the Screen Actors Guild.
Citing Sean Penn’s Best Actor Oscar
speech for Milk, Reitman declares “the gay rights movement is the civil rights
question of my generation.” That said, Reitman explains that he doesn’t want to
make a pro-gay movie that would bash homophobes the way he feels The Insider
skewered executives for Big Tobacco.
In addition to be born in Montreal,
Reitman was raised (mostly in LA) in a half Jewish, half Christian household.
“There’s a very arrogant American idea that my way is right and I don’t need to
hear any other version of reality and that drives me up the wall!”
Noting the success he’s had working
with sharp tongued Ellen Page and Anna Kendrick, I asked Reitman if he
could imagine a lesbian story that fit his criteria.
“I would (love) doing, say my
generation’s Inherit the Wind, something that spoke to the danger of
religion and the way that it not only drives our politics but somehow drives
our personal values.”
“In the case of Thank You for
Smoking, everyone was vilifying smokers and cigarette companies. Cigarette
companies are basically a mass of people who trying to make a living, there are
plenty of people who work for MacDonald’s and Coke who do just as awful things.
If I was going to make a dark film I would probably seek to mock things most
people think of as pleasant – vegans, or Prius owners.”
“I’m never going to make Milk
for the same reason I’m never going to make The Insider. I remember going
to hear Jeffrey Wigand (the scientist who blew the whistle on the cigarette
moguls) debate. I feel in love with the Phillip Morris guy – Jeffrey Wigand is
listing stats and telling how dangerous cigarettes are (I thought, ‘Yeah, I get
it!’) – the Philip Morris guy went on stage in California where everybody hated
him, he had a smile and knew how to deal with our questions.”
“I’d make a (gay) movie that was
revelatory, that humanizes an otherwise villainous character. I don’t know what
that is yet.”