I've liked both of Jason Reitman's last two endeavors but haven't LOVED them. I was more than ready to love Thank You For Smoking after seeing the trailer and I think the trailer set the movie up to fail. Too often indie movie trailers misrepresent the movie to such a degree that I feel robbed when I get in to the theater. I know that the marketers responsibility ends when they've gotten you into your seat but I think there are ways to do that without being disingenuous. Anyway, I liked Thank You For Smoking and Juno but I didn't fall head over heels in love. I felt the same way about Up In The Air.
Reitman has an almost Wes Anderson-esque mastery of music. All of his soundtracks fit the movies they're designed for like a glove. Imbuing the movies they belong to with all sorts of layers of additional substance. The opening and closing songs in this movie continue that trend. The jazzy cover of This Land Is Your Land really sets the tone. I've NEVER liked the twangy regular verson of the song, but hearing the horn section kick in while Sharon Jones adds a soulful layer to the song really kind of grabbed me.
Then, after we've faded to the credit scroll on the black background a voice pops up and says hello to Jason (Reitman) and says that he wrote this song after he got laid off from his job and thought that maybe he could put it in his movie. A couple weeks ago I read this...
according to an interview with Reitman that aired on National Public Radio last week, the director decided to use real-life people who had lost their jobs as stand-ins for the people being fired by Clooney's character, a corporate hit man.
"At a certain point during scouting, I realized that the scenes that I had written of people getting fired were just inauthentic," Reitman said in the interview.
"We needed something that spoke to the times and what was really happening. I cut out all the firing scenes in the movie and we put ads out in the paper, both in Detroit and St. Louis, saying that we were making a documentary about job loss."
According to the Detroit Free Press, about 10 people from each city made it into the finished film.
So hearing the song at the end was really kind of cool. Pulled the whole thing together.
There was really only one moment that punched me in the gut. It didn't have anything to do with Clooney's character Ryan Bingham's job or the idea of traveling around all the time. It was while he and the woman he meets were in Milwaukee at his sister's wedding. Bingham offers to walk his sister down the aisle and after being rebuffed hears that he's not even really part of their lives. He doesn't exist. While Ang and I don't travel all that often. It's sort of a similar situation. We left Minnesota going on seven years ago. Since then, we've been back maybe 10 times? Everytime we go back there whole sections of town spring up and building get replaced. Everything there evolves and changes without us being there and influencing or taking part in it. We have our lives here and people and friends we invest in, but the family that we grew up with continue to live their lives back in Minnesota without us. We don't exist, really. So hearing Ryan(which sounds way too much like Brian)'s sister tell him that he abdicated his responsibilities really hit me kind of hard.
Should you see the movie? Yeah, I think so. It's worth seeing. If it were to win some Oscars, I wouldn't be offended in the slightest. It's quality film-making and it shows through how little it has to do thematically with Reitman's first two films that he's got versatility and is growing into a pretty great director. I'm curious to see what's next for him.
More tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment