GITS Script Reading and Analysis Series: “Up In The Air” — Themes

This week we are analyzing the screenplay for Up In The Air (screenplay by Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner, based on a novel by Walter Kirn).

You can access the 8/19/08 draft here. Today we discuss the script’s themes.

There are several of them. Which ones do you see at work in the story?

Ross Douthat had an interesting take in the NYT in this March 9, 2010 column. An excerpt:

Many of the movie’s critics, wary of Reitman’s politics after the quasi-pro-life “Juno” and the quasi-libertarian “Thank You For Smoking,” seem to suspect that movie is functionally right-wing — or at least that it lets American capitalism off the hook too easily. Lim, for instance, accuses “Up in the Air” of “shape-shift[ing] from a fondly critical view of the cruel business world to a family-values tract.” But he’s missing the point: The family-values material, the message that relationships matter more than personal independence and material success, ultimately makes the movie’s critique of the business world that much more stinging, and gradually purges all the fondness from Reitman’s portrayal of corporate America. It’s fair to call the film “conservative,” I suppose, in the sense that it suggests that ordinary decency and human connections can help people survive economic vicissitudes. But its essential theme is populist, in ways that the progressive left and Tea Party right should both be able to appreciate. “Up in the Air” focuses on a “lonely corporate executioner” rather than his victims because it’s an indictment of corporate executioners, and the entire business elite along with them — those deracinated, bottom-line obsessed high-flyers who treated our economy like a giant casino and left the country holding the bag. And the fact that the emblematic high-flyer is played by the glib and charming George Clooney doesn’t change the fact that the movie is more interested in exposing his follies than in rewarding him for finally coming to his senses.

For more of the column, go here.

See you in comments for your thoughts.

For Day 1 of our analysis, you can go here.

Part 2 here.

Part 3 here.

Tomorrow: Dialogue.

NOTE: THIS SERIES AND THE USE OF SCRIPTS IS STRICTLY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES!

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