‘Up in the Air’ brings Clooney down to earth
Hollywood hunk George Clooney learns to regret his independence as
Oscar-nominated Canadian director Jason Reitman’s comedy ‘Up in the Air’
screened at the Rome film festival on Saturday.
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US actor George Clooney and girlfriend Italian model and actress
Elisabetta Canalis arrive for the screening of ‘Up in the Air’
on October 17. AFP |
Clooney’s character Ryan Bingham clocks millions of air miles flying
around the United States coolly firing people for companies that are
downsizing in the movie based on a novel by Walter Kirn. The job seems a
perfect match for a man who revels in his independence, and he finds a
kindred spirit in Alex (Vera Farmiga), whose work also takes her away
from home most of the time.
“Think of me as someone just like you, only with a vagina,” she
assures Ryan in the film, one of 14 vying for the Marc’Aurelio award at
the festival’s fourth edition, which runs through next Friday. Things
start to unravel when Ryan uses the L word - well, almost: “I like you,”
he tells her - and tries to tinker with their arrangement. “Not many
characters come to an epiphany about companionship through loss rather
than romance,” said Reitman, whose ‘Juno’ about a pregnant teenager won
the top prize here in 2007.
“It’s a movie about individualism (which offers) an opportunity to be
disconnected,” he said. With a character such as Ryan, “in fact you’re
not everywhere, you’re nowhere.” The unmarried Clooney, the subject of
widespread speculation about his love life, insisted he was nothing like
his character. “I have a pretty great life, great friends, people I’m
close to... I don’t find myself often alone.”
Clooney, 48, turned up at the Venice film festival last month with
new girlfriend Elisabetta Canalis, an Italian former showgirl and
television presenter. Also Saturday, Dima El-Horr unveiled ‘Every Day Is
a Holiday’, a sort of road trip in war-scarred Lebanon.
“We live in such a tormented country, an absurd country,” El-Horr
said. “We have the feeling that reality is always mingled with fantasy.”
The film takes place on Lebanon’s Independence Day, when three women
meet on a bus heading to visit their partners in a prison in a remote
part of the country. Melding reality with fantasy, it becomes a metaphor
for the women’s private quests for independence. AFP
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