It’s a prerequisite that I should say something negative about Reitman’s last film Juno, but to be honest, I thought it was decent. Definitely cutesy, but decent. His latest offering is neither adorable or what I was expecting and I must be amongst the last people in America to finally see it. What really surprised me about UITA was the willingness of the film to be a downer and the success that the film has had despite it. Perhaps my fellow Midwesterners were willing to accept disappointment heaped upon a man more handsome than themselves, who has never sought to entangle himself into familial circumstances, and who makes a living ending others ability to do so themselves. But unlike the more obviously and comically transgressive tobacco lobbyist Aaron Eckhart played in Reitman’s first feature Thank You For Smoking, Clooney plays a far more sensitive and sympathetic character from the outset of this film. His particular career isn’t one that he specifically relishes; it merely suits the lifestyle he chooses to pursue when he is not on the clock. He is a man with a code he attempts to work from and actively fights a more cynical approach to what it is that he does for more than merely selfish reasons.
I expected for the film to show some caution in approaching the presently sensitive and very real issue of job loss in this country, and it did. I also expected that they would touch on that at the beginning and at the end and the rest of the film would be more comical in tone. Ultimately though, this is a drama with black comedy elements and not the other way around. It’s a much better movie than I anticipated because of that design. While I won’t get into the specifics here for fear of spoiling any details for those who haven’t seen it, this film uses job loss, travel, idiosyncratic tangents and the specific choice of career for the leads very successfully as a setting only, while it explores the more interesting and subtle themes of identity, coping mechanisms and regret. I didn’t see that coming in the increasingly snarky trailers and I was happy to have it sneak up on me in the theatre.
