In Contention

Tag: Thank You for Smoking

  • INTERVIEW: Jason Reitman

    Jason ReitmanTelluride Film Festival

    Four days ago, Jason Reitman finalized his latest film, “Up in the Air,” by making one final song change. Two days ago he unveiled it to its first-ever first audience, his nerves shot. Today, somewhat more relaxed in the wake of a warm reception to the film, he’s sitting outside at a cafe on a sunny day, the famous gondolas of Telluride swinging around and up the hillside to Mountain Village behind him as he thinks back on the experience.

    “It felt really good,” he says. “I’ve never had that short a period of time between finishing a film and it showing for the first time. I’m used to having a few weeks to get nervous, but I was really making creative choices up until the last second. It was almost surreal, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m watching it with an audience.’ And there’s this moment when you give up the movie. It stops being yours and starts being everyone else’s. It’s unusual. People laugh at a certain point or they’ll find something moving that you didn’t expect. They start telling you what the movie was. I didn’t expect that emotional experience for myself. A lot came together Saturday.”

    Reitman began conceiving the story of “Up in the Air” — which strays considerably from the film’s source material, a 2002 Walter Kirn novel — six years ago. (Sheldon Turner, who shares screen credit on the adaptation, penned a draft early on, but Reitman came from his own place on things.)  He began turning over its themes in his head, considering them in their barest form.. “They started coalescing further a few years ago,” he says, “and then, really in the year leading up to the movie, right after ‘Juno,’ it suddenly felt like, you know, this was a question I really needed to ask. I go through the same questions that the main character does.”

    In the film, George Clooney stars as career transition specialist Ryan Bingham, a hired gun terminator. It’s an element of the film that skims the zeitgeist but its the personal journey of the character that Reitman wanted to dig at, notions of one’s responsibility to engage with the world around you, with one’s family, and the idea that no man is — or at least no man should be — an island unto himself.

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  • Is Jason Reitman the new Billy Wilder?

    Jason ReitmanThat USA Today profile on Jason Reitman, penned by IC friend Anthony Breznican, was still simmering in my mind recently when an acquaintance mentioned an intriguing comparison Breznican made on his Facebook page. “To me, this guy is the next Billy Wilder,” Breznican wrote of Reitman. “His films are hilarious, but also peer uncompromisingly into our darker sides.”

    I turned it over in my head a few times and, ultimately, I couldn’t think of a reason to disagree.  One of Wilder’s most defining characteristics was his versatility, so it’s a bit early to draw a parallel there.  That having been said, “Thank You for Smoking” is an entirely different film with drastically different themes than “Juno,” and “Up in the Air” looks to take things in a new direction yet again.

    Wilder may have exhibited less flash than Reitman, but he also placed a considerable emphasis on the screenplay.  Despite Reitman’s panache (which is by no means overstated), his films, so far, have been very much made in the writing.  And I’m with Breznican.  It’s hard to argue that Reitman isn’t in some way interested in what lurks beneath the surface of daily niceties.

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  • PAGE TO SCREEN: “Up in the Air” by Walter Kirn

    Cover of Up in the Air by Walter Kirn“Airworld” is novelist Walter Kirn’s term for the impermanent realm of regional American air travel, a sleek network of bland local airports and adjacent beige hotel rooms, linked by the plush grey trails of business-class flights. It forms the scattered but otherwise constant home to thousands of American corporate drones, and is the simultaneously alien and mundane setting for “Up in the Air” – soon reaching your screens courtesy of writer-director Jason Reitman and star George Clooney.

    Droll, dry and ultimately rather heartless, it’s clear that Kirn (“Thumbsucker”) positioned his novel as a kind of “Bonfire of the Vanities” for post-millennial readers, a work that diagnoses the ills of corporate America and chimes in with a wider sense of social malaise.

    The novel, however, had the misfortune of hitting the shelves shortly before the events of 9/11 forever shifted the rules of his own Airworld. By the time it appeared in paperback, not only had Kirn’s milieu rapidly dated, but few readers were keen to enter that territory, and “Up in the Air” never took off as was perhaps intended.

    Whether by accident or design, Reitman’s adaptation of the novel also comes along at a time when the material couldn’t be more touchily topical, albeit for different reasons. Its anti-hero of sorts is Ryan Bingham, a 35 year-old human resources exec and first-class Airworld citizen, whose field of expertise is “Career Transition Counseling” – in other words, someone brought in by companies to tactfully fire employees, a self-proclaimed Grim Reaper to white-collar America.

    It’s a nervy subject for a feature film in the midst of a global economic recession that is providing plenty of business for men like Bingham, if few others; but whether audiences will be any more willing to embrace this than they were Kirn’s novel remains to be seen, and will largely depend on the warmth and lightness of touch Reitman and his universally liked leading man can bring to the material.

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