It's A Live: SATURDAY NIGHT

I suppose it’s fitting that a movie set behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live’s first episode is only fitfully funny, but coasts along on a combination of high spirits, energetic impersonations, and its musical guest. That’s the typical SNL experience. Is there a television program with a bigger disparity between its cultural importance and its actual potential week-to-week quality? Nonetheless, the sheer number of talented performers and writers who’ve cycled through the show over the course of 50 seasons is staggering, and the hit-and-miss quality is nonetheless an essential part of the appeal. It puts the variety in variety show, turning up occasional fun even long past its semi-countercultural origins. What other show can go whole episodes, or seasons, or decades, in decline and still have people wondering what they’ll do next? With Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, the movie is primarily interested in that creative chaos that somehow, inevitably, makes it on air. He gets a little extra charge of dramatic tension by setting it on the show’s first night. Will it even get on the air, in its amorphous, evolving form where no one quite knows what it’ll even be or become, when the actors and executives are nervous, before it’s codified and corporatized into cultural expectations? That we know it does saps the movie of some of that charge, but he makes up for it by letting his events—heightened extrapolations of real showbiz lore—play out in real time. It’s a flurry of activity as producer and co-creator Lorne Michaels races from room to room—a pretty convincing recreation of the famous studio—as creatives of all departments clash and scurry as the ticking clock of showtime draws nearer.

In each scene we are met with broad performances of recognizable figures, as if to suggest in a fan’s shorthand that they’re just as much cartoons off screen as on. With an Andy Kaufman, the unknowability could be a point; with a Belushi or Chase or Aykroyd or Henson (or or or…) they’re just a flavoring in a large dish. They're all energetic and amused performances, even though no one gets to be characterized beyond a little shtick and a few tics, each member just one fluttering piece of a larger swirling ensemble juggled and scrambled in a frenzy right up until the show must go on. (I wondered what someone unfamiliar with SNL would make of all this unexplained commotion.) It’s all of a piece with Reitman’s typical approach to faking verisimilitude. His films’ ideas of reality are often communicated through movie language more than reality itself. Here he gives the proceedings a kind of studied glossy shagginess that uses shaky-cam, high-grain, whip-pan, roaming camerawork to sell energy and excitement and reality, even as its cast bites into thinly written characters with performative gusto. It’s all smiling recognition and tickling good intentions, bathed in hindsight. Meanwhile a jazzy Jon Batiste score chugs along in bits and riffs until blasting into a screaming-sax impersonation of the show’s theme song after the film’s predictable final line. Reitman’s superficial vision doesn’t ultimately claim to understand the people involved or the show’s place in culture—there’s the classic oral history co-written by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales for that—but makes up for it in pleasant tone. The let’s-put-on-a-show momentum keep things brisk and amiable and the inevitable triumphant climax sends it out on a high note.

Busted: GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE

How peculiar that a decades-later return to the world of a pretty flimsy comedy is now puffed up with artificial reverence. The goofy special effects comedy Ghostbusters went from being a hit lark in the summer of 1984 to a kind of revered generational classic among a slim cohort. To hear some fans discuss it, you’d think it was a movie of profound emotional development and loaded with lore. They take it very seriously, so they start thinking the movie itself did, too. But rewatch it now and you might see it is a shaggy, silly thing, always more about a fun theme song, some amusing personalities (Bill Murray chief among them), and a sarcastic tone than something spinning its mythology. Thus, after an ill-fated 2016 remake whose women-led cast somehow led to vicious alt-right backlash, the idea of the series as serious business and a generational bequeathment has found a willing vessel: writer-director Jason Reitman, son of the original’s helmer, Ivan. The result is Ghostbusters: Afterlife, an improbably enjoyable movie some of the time, although it runs out of invention and goodwill just short of its finale. That’s because it is better the more it’s just the original reconfigured as a small-town tween adventure family drama, a refreshingly small-scale effort of Amblinesque coming of age sentimentality with a dusting of low-key sci-fi awe—Spielberg’s suburbs and Netflix's Stranger Things in a blender. An ouroboros of franchise filmmaking, the thing is, even at its best, never more than inspiration and rip-off endlessly eating each other. But that is a little fun with surface shine and appealing leads.

This belated sequel trades sarcastic 80’s New Yorkers for a couple of kids relocated to nowhere Oklahoma. A nerdy girl (Mckenna Grace) and her gangly older brother (Finn Wolfhard) are moved by their mother (Carrie Coon) into the creaky farmhouse of their estranged and freshly deceased kook grandfather. Guess what? He was a ghostbuster. And he was prepping the house with gear to stop a new infestation that’s apocalyptically brewing in the nearby abandoned mine. The kids are easy to sympathize with, misfits and outsiders finding some reason to hope for belonging. They’re quickly surrounded with a few more cute young people and one genially amusing science teacher (Paul Rudd). There are lots of cozy shots of the tiny main street and sunny farmlands, with some nostalgia for a crumbling storefront, drive-in-roller-skates Americana. From there, the touches of supernatural stakes—some ghostly hide-and-seek and messages from beyond, and some early splashes of effects-driven scurrying—plays out with a fine slow build and light touch. The screenplay was co-written by Gil Kenan, whose Monster House was a better version of the kid-friendly spooky movie. The moderate enjoyment I got out of this new Ghostbusters’ early going was in its earthier look and genuine interest in its stock types. The pace and tone ends up grooving on a vintage vibe—though it’s set in modern day, there’s a sense it’s playing in tribute to the sorts of blockbusters en vogue forty to fifty years ago.

The trouble really only comes when it decides to be a pure nostalgia play instead. The movie gives over what derivative originality it had to call backs and cameos. The final act of the picture finds a bunch of stuff happening, and tons of creatures and designs appearing, for no reason other than that every bit of that references the original. There’s even a ghoulish digital resurrection that’s so dripping in unearned saccharine notes that it feels all the cheaper. What started as a take on the material that plays perfectly without knowledge of the first couple Ghostbusters, becomes something leaping over gaps that really only get filled in with the logic of a myth-tending sequel. Why did they become that? Why did they go there? How’d they show up? All that’s answered with a shrug and a wink and a rush to make the long-time fans feel flattered. It’s not a million miles away from what Star Wars or Rocky or Star Trek or Halloween (or name your franchise) does from time to time, but this one feels acutely unearned because it is building its ill-fitting puffed up monument to itself on the softest and creakiest of foundations. That’s why it is so much more agreeable the more lightly it wears its legacy.

Tech-ed Off: MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN

It’s easy to see Jason Reitman’s ambition for Men, Women & Children to be a big statement about How We Live Now. The film is a Very Serious ensemble drama about a cross-section of characters living intertwined melodramas a la Crash or Babel. In this case they’re a bunch of high schoolers and their parents in suburban Texas – though really a vague Modern Anytown, USA – who live disconnected from their feelings and each other. We see lives of quiet desperation mediated by screens showing digital spaces that alternately soothe and exacerbate their problems. Fair enough, but despite fitfully operating as effective drama, it’s clearly a movie built thesis statement backwards into character and incident, frozen by its own sense of importance. Worse, there’s not much to its thesis, which is as muddled as it is trite, developing its emptiness with a heavy hand.

I suppose muddled moralizing speaks, even accidentally, to our societal ambivalence towards technology. It’d be an interesting idea around which to build a drama, but Reitman, adapting with Erin Cressida Wilson a novel by Chad Kultgen, creates a series of events that reflect bland reprimand, concerned handwringing, or vacuous same-as-it-ever-was resignation, sometimes all at once. Caught halfway between scolding and shrugging, it has a view of the Internet that feels so outdated and incomplete I almost expected to hear a modem dial up on the soundtrack. Plot threads involve infidelities, romances, repression, self-harm, painful yearning, and a variety of questionable decisions. Each is filtered through and aided by the Internet. That’s what gives it a patina of timeliness around which it spins rather empty, cliché stories saved only fitfully by strong acting across the board.

The best plotline, perhaps because it draws best on the small character work Reitman did well in better movies like Juno and Young Adult, involves two high school kids dealing with emotional issues. She (Kaitlyn Dever, of Short Term 12 and ABC’s Last Man Standing) is a loner, bookish, sweet, and under the surveillance of a technophobe mother (Jennifer Garner). He (Ansel Elgort, of The Fault in Our Stars) is a football player who quit the team when his mom left the family, leaving his dad (Dean Norris) inattentive to his son’s depression. The kids forge a connection that feels genuine, and twists around the tech in a reasonably convincing way. Other stories aren’t as successful. A bored married couple (Rosemarie DeWitt and Adam Sandler) each secretly turn to the web to find affairs, a plotline that’s a weird blend of shame and forgiveness and, unfortunately, does not turn into a “Piña Colada Song” situation. Their son (Travis Tope) is addicted to porn. His real-life crush is a fame-hungry cheerleader (Olivia Crocicchia) whose mother (Judy Greer) lets her start a modeling website. Meanwhile, a fellow cheerleader (Elena Kampouris) suffers from body image problems brought about by bullying and egged on by online friends.

With a sprawling Message Movie format, there is unevenness built into the structure. Individual stories or scenes work well, but the big picture is a muddle of good intentions, flawed observations, and bad decisions. It’s all tied together with arch narration (by Emma Thompson, speaking in a voice not too far from her Stranger Than Fiction storyteller) that prattles on against the backdrop of space, speaking about Carl Sagan as NASA hardware floats by. Then she’ll dip down with an edit into quotidian explanations about character thoughts and actions, drolly telling us details we can plainly see before us. Reitman’s repetitive screenplay includes heavy-handed, awkwardly inserted, digressions reflecting on 9/11 and “my, how much the world has changed.” Yes. And? It’s a dash of self-serious muttering.

The film’s worst tendencies are reflected in Garner’s character, who has a keystroke logger on her daughter’s devices and hosts fearmongering info sessions for fellow parents. She starts as a humorless paranoid scold who means well. Over the course of her storyline, she goes from spying on everything her daughter does to stopping cold turkey. In the world of this movie, it’s all or nothing, ignoring both the very real benefits of parental oversight and the virtues of trust and flexibility. It’s too uncomfortable lingering in grey areas, too eager to wrap up conflicts. So much so that for all its overt exploring of the screen-saturated culture’s impact on individuals – I liked a recurring image of crowds, everyone looking at screens, their apps hovering translucently above them like a cloud of distraction – the worst events any characters go through happen entirely (or almost entirely) offline.

The movie seems to want a Big Statement, but isn’t sure what to say. In some ways it’s progressive, acknowledging that sometimes lonely, socially isolated people can find solace online that can improve their real world well being. And it’s certainly true that one can get lost in the muck of the web’s worst tendencies. Our world is complex. But every story in this movie that resolves wraps up neatly with a pat Internet-good-for-this, Internet-bad-for-that judgment. Other storylines drop off without resolution, maybe for the best, since I don’t think the filmmakers, though they bring the subjects up, had meaningful discussion of body image, sexual fantasies, or sex work in them. What’s here is an attempt to pass off well-intentioned fumbling in the shallow end as an important deep dive.

Dumb Love: LABOR DAY

A romance is at the center of Labor Day. The plot hinges on it. The characters are motivated by it. The emotional resolution for all involved depends upon it. And I didn’t buy it, not even for a second. 

The movie is about a depressed single mother (Kate Winslet) who only leaves the house once a month, taking her 12-year-old son (Gattlin Griffith) with her to load up on four weeks of groceries and supplies. That’s what they’re doing at the start of the movie, heading out on their monthly shopping trip on the Thursday before Labor Day, 1987. There they are confronted by a man (Josh Brolin) with a small circle of blood on the side of his white shirt. He calmly and quietly intimidates them into giving him a ride. He stalks with them out to the car, gets in the back seat, and tells her to drive. Where to? “Your house,” he says. Once there, he agrees to not hurt them in exchange for allowing him to hide out. You see, he’s a prisoner who escaped mere hours before. He would much rather wait out the manhunt and skip off through the woods and onto a train than have to return and serve out the rest of his 18-year stay behind bars.

Where’s the romance in this, you ask? Why, it develops between Winslet and Brolin. She, trembling and morose, and he, quiet charisma, are drawn into each other’s emotional orbits as a hurt and depressed woman finds her neediness and loneliness complimented and matched by a criminal with neediness and loneliness that’s something like hers. Eventually, artful flashbacks tucked into the corners of scenes in our present day narrative reveal that these characters have gone through some infant-related traumas and significant others who have long since left one way or another. They’re both damaged, but together they feel like life might be okay now that someone understands them. But that’s all sitting under the narrative like sap about to be tapped until it drains out in great globs of sentimentality. At first the situation is simply menacing – a bloody escaped prisoner quickly and calmly muscles his way into the home of a child and defenseless parent! But the movie watches him make chili, teach them his recipe for peach pie, and set about fixing loose steps and changing the furnace filter. What a guy.

The only people who can truly understand a relationship are the ones living it. This one’s all about longing and deprivation, two people who have been alone for so long, trapped (in prison, in her thoughts), but ready to let desire to connect set off sparks. It’s an adult attraction that goes over the son’s head, but not the film’s. It’s a physical, sticky film, the muggy late-August small-town setting closing in. The characters are sweaty all the time, clothes sticking, hair slick and matted. Everyone seems uncomfortable and overheated. No wonder it’s such a perfect setting for passions to come to a boil, and then boil over. I’m all for good, honest melodrama, and Labor Day is nothing but earnest. But it never finds a convincing way of moving the pieces of the puzzle into a believable place. I just never bought that Winslet’s character, so hesitant and cautious, would let that caution slip for a character like Brolin’s, a clear and immediate threat. I understand getting caught in the dangerous situation, but not the way he so quickly erodes her suspicion.

The story is told from the son’s point of view. Nostalgia-soaked narration provided by Tobey Maguire as the now-grown son strings events along, filling in some psychological shading without cracking open the central attraction. He’s suspicious for sure, tentatively accepting some father-figure bonding (praise, a nickname, baseball tips), while worrying about his mother’s well-being. To a certain extent, the point of view excuses some of the romance’s inherent unknowability, but not its unbelievability. It’s a shame the film’s core falls flat while there is this wonderful characterization of the boy on the cusp of a big change. Griffith is far and away more believable than the adults anchoring the drama.

The young actor has a boyish face cut with faint adolescent angles, softly innocent with a faint awareness of adult matters creeping underneath. The film is best when focused on his mental state, on this liminal space between childhood playfulness and teenage roiling. There’s an early throwaway detail in front of a magazine rack as he has a moment of hesitant embarrassed curiosity, reaching for a glamour magazine with an alluring cover model before pulling away towards a rack of comic books when he sees someone nearby. Another scene in which he has an abstractly sensual dream – a rapid-fire montage of winking cover models, a half-remembered bra strap’s outline as seen through a classmate’s t-shirt, and an imagined embrace – is potent. The experience of being a 7th-grade boy is so nicely observed, I found myself wishing the film would become less relentlessly focused on its increasingly strained plot.

But it does have a plot, adapted from a novel by Joyce Maynard by Jason Reitman. He’s swerving hard away from the genre on which he’s made his name, largely convincing character-study comedies of various flavors: satiric (Thank You For Smoking), workplace/romantic (Up in the Air), dark (Young Adult), and teen-centric (Juno). It’s too early to tell if this is a minor experiment or a change in direction for his career, but it’s nice to see a promising director willing to try something new, even if it doesn’t work. Labor Day, though attractively shot with lovely cinematography by Eric Steelberg and having a great sense of place and a well-cast ensemble, never comes together. Quivering with import on details of its drama, characters are moved around under the assumption that we’re with them, while I cringed, hoping someone would eventually make the right decision. Turns out, the movie and I were rooting for different outcomes.

Labor Day has thriller mechanics ticking under the sentimentality. It should and sometimes does play as a rooting interest in the boy or one of the townspeople (neighbors Brooke Smith and J.K. Simmons, police officer James Van Der Beek) finding the right moment to let the world know the fugitive is here, swooping in and saving Winslet from falling for him. This consensual kidnapping is in severe need of deflation before the sentimental music twinkles and the sun-dappled cinematography sells us on a romance that’s The Desperate Hours by way of Nicholas Sparks. But, no, love it is, maybe even True Love. And it never feels right to me, especially as the son shifts his eyes, and the score scrapes out suspense whenever Brolin gets close to caught. I wanted him to go back to jail, and the movie just plain won’t work if that’s the case. 

Grow Up: YOUNG ADULT

Honest to blog, Young Adult is the best thing Diablo Cody’s ever written, homeskillet. It’s sharp, funny, more than a little dark, and with nice nuance and shape. At its center is a fiercely committed performance from Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary, a young adult writer – well, more like ghost writer – up against a deadline. We’ll soon learn that her self-identified personas are in for some reality checks. We first see Mavis passed out on her bed. She begrudgingly gets up and stalks around her apartment, does her Wii Fit exercising, and then watches some Bravo reality shows while chugging a two-liter of Diet Coke. Then she sits down to peck out a few more lines of prose, but finds herself opening her email instead.

This opening sequence rings so true, feels drawn from the experience of a working writer and embellished (maybe) for her character. We know what kind of person Mavis is right away, and even if we didn’t, it’s made clear when she opens a mass email from her high school boyfriend (Patrick Wilson) and his wife (Elizabeth Reaser) announcing the birth of their first child. She decides that her long-ago ex must be miserable. Knowing that she can technically work from anywhere, she packs a bag and leaves Minneapolis for her small hometown, determined to fix her life by getting back with her high school boyfriend.

Once back in town, she’s acutely reminded of all the reasons why she needed to escape in the first place. Her parents (Jill Eikenberry and Richard Bekins) still hang a picture of her ex-husband on the wall. Her old boyfriend is far from miserable. Some of her old high school acquaintances view the return of the “psycho prom queen bitch” (their words) with skepticism. And the only old classmate who will actually talk with her, the only one she can actually open up to, is the bullied, beaten, nerd (Patton Oswalt) who now lives a quiet, simple life, his only regular source of social interaction his sweet sister (Collette Wolfe).

The film walks a tricky line; Mavis is a monstrous social creature and yet oddly sympathetic as well. (It also may be a film covertly, or maybe even not so covertly, about an alcoholic, a manic-depressive, or both). She feels her life entering a dead end, and that’s painful, but the way she awkwardly grasps at the last remaining connections to the seemingly happy, popular, teenage girl she once was is sad, pathetic, and horrifying in a compelling, even occasionally endearing, way. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll realize that as she got older, she never really matured. The movie’s smart enough to know that such a shift may take time, more time than the narrative of the film allows, but it’s a film open ever so slightly to the possibility of change.

The director here is Jason Reitman. His adeptness with juggling ensembles can certainly be felt in the uniformly excellent cast who breathe life into the clever script. Reitman collaborated with Cody previously on Juno, a film of too-cute quirkiness and affectations that nonetheless gained some amount of very real charm and emotional power with a sure directorial hand, even if it’s perhaps one of too-slick shagginess, and an impressive cast. Young Adult, on the other hand, is a deconstruction of affectations and the characters, though less appealing, are no less relatable, which is why the film feels so much more savage in its satirical aims.

It’s the anti-Juno. In that film, the pregnant-teen protagonist’s outsider persona is embraced by those who love her; the cutting quips in her narration can be poisoned-dart punchlines. Here, Mavis is constantly either preparing to go out, placing the final touches on her persona, or dressing down in a casual carelessness when she knows she’ll be alone. She uses her outsider persona as a shield, behind which she fires harsh, judgmental potshots. She wants to make a connection with someone, anyone, but at the same time seems scared to try. Her whiplash shifts between harshly disparaging and cringingly needy are emotional time bombs.

The film itself strikes a nice ambivalent tone. Sometimes – okay, rarely – Mavis makes some kind of sense; we want to root for her. But her apparent obliviousness to her baseline social discomfort is so excruciating. By the time the film starts to slowly, painfully let the air leak out of her self-centered worldview, the fun starts to go with it. By the end, I was more interested the entertained, but Mavis Gary remained one of the most fascinating characters of 2011.

Purposely Adrift: UP IN THE AIR

I’m trying to resist the urge to call Up in the Air “timely” or “the movie of the moment,” but it can’t be helped. Director Jason Reitman’s film, which he wrote with Sheldon Turner from the novel by Walter Kirn, captures the zeitgeist in its opening moments and never lets it go. This is the kind of movie that feels just right. It made me sit back in my seat and think to myself “Yes, this is how we live now.” And yet, the film isn’t self-important or singularly focused on making broad statements about our time. Reitman never loses sight of the fact that he’s telling a story about specific characters. These characters are so fully formed through perfectly pitched writing and acting that I could have spent time with them for much longer.

The film opens with a series of firings, the despondent faces of the fired looking back at us angry, confused, on the verge of tears. Then we meet the man on the other side of the table, the bearer of bad news. He’s Ryan Bingham (George Clooney). He’s contracted by companies to fire their employees. In the current economic downturn, he’s given remarkable job security which enables him to cultivate his deliberately untethered lifestyle, a kind of life that has him away from his Omaha apartment for over 300 days out of every year. When he is forced to stay in Omaha he returns to an apartment that is cold, sterile, and bare, without any indication that someone lives there. It’s a home that is less personal than a hotel, which is, of course, where he’d rather be.

He has a system for travelling that is nothing short of perfection. We see him packing his suitcase, going through security, and boarding a plane, each step moving with a rapid pace and crisp precision. We see tranquil aerial views announcing each new city that illuminate the respite Bingham finds while in flight. He’s hiding his emptiness behind routine, or at least that’s how it would be clearly delineated if this were the traditional Hollywood effort setting up the jaded cynic to learn how to open up and love life. This isn’t that movie, even though Bingham does receive some unanticipated changes in his perfectly honed routine.

These changes come in the form of two women. The first is a frequent flyer with whom he starts a casual romance when their paths cross in a hotel bar. As played by Vera Farmiga, this woman is the female equivalent to Bingham, a career-driven woman who can only meet him when their flight schedules happen to cross. The interactions between Farmiga and Clooney are filled with spark and wit, two incredibly confident personalities bouncing off and feeding into each other. Farmiga is radiant, and it’s not just the reflection off of Clooney’s likability. This is one of the most likable on-screen romances I’ve seen recently. How often do you actually want the characters to end up together instead of just mutually agreeing to go along with the movie’s romantic formula? I’m even more grateful, then, that the romance is so touchingly nuanced, so grounded in reality. Neither of them makes unbelievable shifts, even when they do something surprising. This is an adult interaction, an adult romance. That’s not to say it’s pornographic (though it manages to be frank without being specific), but rather it’s a casual romance that involves two adults who conduct their relationship in a thoroughly adult manner. Romances in Hollywood productions, even a wonderful film like (500) Days of Summer, lock their participants in a state of stunted romantic development with notions relating to relationships stuck in an adolescent state. Here, Farmiga and Clooney behave as adults who have had experiences, have lived lives, and are finding some moments of solace in finding each other.

The other woman who causes change in Bingham’s lifestyle is a new hire at the company that keeps him on the road. Played by Anna Kendrick, she’s a motormouthed delight. Fresh out of college, she wants to eliminate the need for so much travel despite much protest from Bingham who argues that she should understand the nuances of firing before trying to shake things up. Their boss (the always excellent Jason Bateman) sends them on the road together on a whirlwind downsizing mission. Kendrick and Clooney have an unforced rapport that starts in a place of hostility but has the possibility to become, not friendship exactly, but something closer to mutual respect. The relationship between these two characters is so convincing that it carries the film through what could have been treacherous avenues. The characters, with their age gap, are never drawn into a squirmy romantic attraction but nor do they move in a more paternal direction. This is an unforced portrait of cross-generational exchange that feels accurately and closely observed.

In a film like this, casting is almost everything. If the wrong actors were put in place, the movie, even with its strong writing, would fall apart. Luckily Farmiga, Kendrick, and Clooney are perfect in the kind of convergence between performer and character that leaves one entirely unable to imagine a different cast. Farmiga gives a glowing portrait of thirty-something beauty and she’s totally charming, but she also brings a hint of hidden depths of pain behind her easy-going attitude. Kendrick is a force of nature, always moving, always quick to speak, and yet she projects a fragility behind her confident bravado that reveals how young and out-of-place she feels, especially when firing a person twice her age. But Clooney may pull off the greatest acting feat out of the three of them, taking his winning one-step-ahead star persona and subtly subverting it in a way that seems effortless, turning Bingham into a man who lies to everyone about how happy he is, especially himself. He, like the film, is all sparkling charm over a nearly unfathomable sadness.

As the film moves into its final moments, it risks falling into a false crisis or a sappy sentimentality, especially with Bingham deciding to attend an event he seems indifferent towards at the opening of the film. That doesn’t happen. Jason Reitman has remarkable control over the tone and trajectory of the film, manipulating it with skill, staying true to his characters. He has grown remarkably as a director over the course of his first three features. Thank You for Smoking (2006) was a funny satire that would occasionally get a little sloppy in its tone. Juno (2007) featured incredible performances that were sometimes hurt by the odd faux-slang of Diablo Cody’s otherwise heartfelt screenplay. Now, with Up in the Air, Reitman has delivered a work that feels of one smooth piece from beginning to end. It’s a film that operates from a perceptive base of knowledge that filters through every scene, thoughtful and touching about how people really interact. And yet it is wedded to a Hollywood-slick style that features impeccable craft from all departments. This is truly one of the best of the year, not just because it’s timely, but because it’s well made in all aspects. This is a studio dramedy that scrapes at real emotions, that has a sense of reality in its ability to hold painful melancholy underneath the unexpectedly sweet.