Review: Tully (2018)

* * * 1/2
Director: Jason Reitman
Starring: Charlize Theron

Although they've had success separately, it feels safe to say at this point that director Jason Reitman and writer Diablo Cody function best as a team. 2007's Juno remains their big hit, both commercially and in terms of awards, while 2011's Young Adult remains one of the most criminally under-seen and under-appreciated movies of the last decade. Their latest film, Tully, is neither the heart-warming crowd pleaser that Juno was, nor does it possess the same acidic, take-no-prisoners attitude of Young Adult, but it's a sharply written and wholly compassionate film about a woman who is drowning in the responsibilities and expectations of motherhood. That woman is played by Charlize Theron, an actress who has no fear of leaning into a character's worst qualities without trying to soften them, which is exactly what the role demands. The performance is tremendous and the film itself rises to meet it.

Review: Men, Women & Children (2014)

*
Director: Jason Reitman
Starring: Jennifer Garner, Adam Sandler, Rosemarie DeWitt, Ansel Elgort, Kaitlyn Dever

Put on your pearls and get ready to clutch them, because apparently there's this new thing called the internet and it is going to destroy the very fabric of society. I am genuinely perplexed as to how a filmmaker as young as Jason Reitman can make a film as wildly out of touch as Men, Women & Children, a bizarre piece of moral panic propaganda that I have a hard time believing could actually speak to anyone, it's so shrill and hysterical. Despite making the wrong choice at basically every turn, Reitman's film actually does manage to eke out a moment or two of genuine emotion, but it can hardly register when it's surrounded by so much absurdity.

Review: Young Adult (2011)

* * * 1/2
Director: Jason Reitman
Starring: Charlize Theron, Patton Oswalt, Patrick Wilson

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) longs to return to her high school days because she believes that that was when she was at her best. What she fails to realize is that it wasn't so much that she was at her best in high school as that she still had people around to validate her awfulness. Reuniting writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman, Young Adult is a film as acid as Juno was sweet, replacing a naive but likeable protagonist with one almost dangerously delusional and misanthropic. It's the feel good movie of the holiday season!

Review: Up In The Air (2009)

* * * 1/2
Director: Jason Reitman
Starring: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick

Only connect - E.M. Forster

(See what I did there? Because Up In The Air is about a guy who avoids close relationships and spends most of his life in airports, so it has a double meaning. Yeah, I’m pretty clever. But enough about me...)

Our hero in this adventure is Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a genial guy who flies around the United States firing people for a living. To most people that might sound like a depressing (perhaps even somewhat evil) occupation, but Ryan loves what he does because it allows him the freedom to exist without strings, to never be in one place long enough to become encumbered by the obligations of a genuine relationship, be it romantic or otherwise. In the current economic climate business is booming but that doesn’t mean that the company has stopped trying to find ways to trim the fat and it looks as if Ryan and the other field agents are about to become casualties of technology, destined for desk jobs in which they perform their duties over the computer. The person behind this plan of action is Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a college grad with all the answers and none of the experience. In an effort to preserve his way of life, Ryan challenges her to get some experience in the field before overhauling the business and the two set out on the road together.

The other woman in Ryan’s life is Alex (Vera Farmiga), with whom he has a casual relationship that is dependent on overlaps in their hectic, cross-country schedules. While Natalie is a young idealist who believes that she can make her life unfold according to her schedule, Alex is a little more cynical, a lot more like Ryan. “Think of me as you with a vagina,” she tells him at one point, much to his delight. Ryan and Alex have a lot of fun together, but their lifestyles ensure that they can never be more than just ships passing in the night – until, of course, it becomes more than that, though not necessarily for both.

The screenplay by Jason Reitman (who also directs) and Sheldon Turner is sharp and funny, particularly in the scenes between Ryan and Natalie. While Ryan readily takes Natalie under his wing so that he may impart the wisdom of his ways to her, she’s reluctant to take him seriously and she subtly picks away at his personal ideology of travelling light. Watching Clooney and Kendrick play off of each other is a delight, particularly the way that she tends to cut their conversations off at the knees, rendering him speechless but giving him the opportunity to make faces of bemused exasperation. Clooney’s rapport with Farmiga is also excellent and their first scene together crackles with a relaxed sexiness. Ryan and Alex get each other and theirs is very much a relationship of equals, which is refreshing. The way that their relationship resolves itself is a bit weak, but the strength of everything leading up to that makes it easy to forgive.

Clooney’s performance in this film has been called the best of his career and I think that’s a fairly accurate assessment. Ryan could easily be a stereotypical man-child, running from commitment at every turn, always moving in order to avoid having to acknowledge the void inside him; but Clooney takes this as a starting point and then actually builds on it to create a full-bodied character. There’s a scene where Ryan tries to soften the blow of a firing by telling a man that rather than disappointing his children by losing his job, he can gain their admiration by pursuing his original passion as a chef, stating that the reason children admire athletes is because they follow their dreams. Later Ryan returns to his hometown with Alex and shows her photos of his days as a high school basketball star - I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There’s a lot of subtlety in the way that he wistfully confronts his past and it becomes clear that one of the reasons he can do what he does is because he sees himself in the people he’s firing. He’s doing for them what he can’t do for himself by freeing them from the corporate drudgery that may bring in money but won’t bring fulfilment – though that probably wouldn’t be much comfort to someone whose been at the same job for decades and doesn’t know how they’ll pay their mortgage.

I liked Up In The Air a lot, but I don’t really get the massive critical fuss over it. With its focus on the current economic crisis and use of real people who have lost their jobs in the firing scenes it wants very much to be relevant and meaningful, but it doesn’t run quite as deep as it’s playing at. At one point Ryan explains that in his business you sell one thing and do another and that’s kind of what the movie is doing, too. It’s a slick bit of business, selling the audience on the idea that it’s about the little people, the common man struggling to stay above water, but really it’s just using these people as props for its far more ordinary plotline about a lost man finding his way. It’s still a very good movie, but it is performing a narrative sleight of hand.

Review: Juno

There doesn’t seem to be much left to say about Juno. It’s every bit as smart and funny as you’ve heard. It’s well acted, well paced, and definitely worth seeing. It is also, of all the films gunning for Best Picture this year, the one that seems most likely to be on the receiving end of backlash by the time the Oscars actually roll around, and one that is already being politicized in ways the filmmakers probably didn’t intend or anticipate.

Juno centers on 16-year-old Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) who has sex once with her friend Paulie (Michael Cera) and finds herself pregnant. Having decided to keep the baby, and found prospective adoptive parents (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman), the film follows Juno through her pregnancy and her attempts to define her relationship with Paulie in light of these recent developments. Director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Diablo Cody present the characters very clearly, not letting any of them lapse into being stupid for the sake of a cheap joke or as a shortcut for propelling the film forward. The characters in this film – from Juno and her friends to her parents – are excellently drawn, fully fleshed in a way that characters in comedies aren’t always allowed to be. Ellen Page is the standout, but Garner, Batement, and J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney (as Juno’s father and stepmother) also give solid performances. Michael Cera is good, too, but he ought to be given that this is the same role he seems to play in everything. Hopefully as his career progresses, he’ll branch out into different kinds of characters.

The film walks a fine line. Some people will find it clever, and others will find it too clever by half, and I worry that the film might ultimately be undone by the amount of goodwill that it has already built up. After months spent hearing how good it is and how funny, I know of a few people who’ve walked out of it claiming that it isn’t that funny. The hype that it’s been building up since it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival has undoubtedly helped it find its audience, but the ensuing Juno lovefest in the media is also probably starting to turn people off or setting people’s expectations too high. This is a great movie, but it isn’t the best movie ever made. This is a great comedy, but not the best comedy ever made.

Hype is one of the reasons why I worry that this movie is a prime contender for backlash, and the other is an aspect of its subject matter. People have already begun to make note that between this film and Knocked Up, 2007 was a year with little room for the pro-choice point-of-view (which, frankly, doesn’t really make it any different from any other year. The only film I can think of in recent years that has actively explored a pro-choice argument was Citizen Ruth, which completely copped out at the end). Juno does consider having an abortion, but the time spent on this decision is brief and the film doesn’t really engage the process of her choice. With the United States going into an election year where the pro-choice/pro-life debate is already a hot button issue, and with the recent announcement of 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears' pregnancy, the excellence of the film might soon be eclipsed by the politics attached to it.

I hope that Juno rises above any problems that politics and media saturation might present, because it really is a wonderful movie. The acting is uniformly good and the story progresses in a way that is very believable, especially in terms of Juno’s relationship with Paulie. The performance by Page and the screenplay by Cody both seem to be givens for Oscar nominations, but hopefully some love with also be shown to the supporting cast, all of whom are given a moment of their own to shine.