Up in the Air

The movie is touchingly brilliant in its depiction of the heartlessness of the corporate machine George Clooney serves with utmost competence and poise. Where it seems to falter emotionally are the few sequences meant to put a human touch on the reality he inhabits. This must be mission impossible – really. The female character, a top Cornell graduate who majored in psychology, exposes with merciless precision the clulessness of much cost-benefit analysis (mocked memorably by Michael Sandel in last year's Reith Lectures) and of reductionist psychology. What ticked me a bit was the amount of product placement in this movie – otherwise positioned as socially conscious: Hilton, Hertz, American Airlines, Chrysler… Granted, it’s not as bad as the merciless merchandizing of Avatar – whose mesmerizing 3D world has been reproduced in plastic and made available on Amazon to the last flickering blade of grass. No, there isn’t anything the matrix cannot swallow and digest with unyielding efficiency…