Up in the Air’s protagonist, Ryan Bingham, is wedded to the idea of being unattached in every sense. “He wants to live a completely disconnected life,” says Reitman. “And what he does for a living is cut people off from what is often most important to them—their jobs.” Reitman drew the character from Kirn’s novel but concocted a new plot, in which Bingham’s airtight world is threatened by a woman (Anna Kendrick) who proposes firing people online rather than face-to-face.
Reitman wrote Up in the Air specifically for Clooney and says he can’t imagine anyone else playing Bingham. “George Clooney believes in old school values,” he says. “There’s a classical sense to him. And he seems to be going through a self-examination with this movie. It’s hard to say this without sounding like an arrogant prick, but I think it will go down as one of his greatest roles. It’s his most vulnerable. He opens up and does something different than he’s ever done before.”
A movie star’s glamour is meant to be invincible, but we’re all dying to see it undermined. Clooney likes to go out of his way to tarnish his matinee-idol image of suave cool and liberal intelligence—he pops up as a manic nutbar in another TIFF premiere, The Men Who Stare at Goats, a screwball comedy based on a semi-true story of the U.S. Army’s secret attempt to create “super-soldiers” with psychic powers. Clooney’s character is not unlike the deadpan dolts he played in the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Burn After Reading—a master of the universe only in his own mind.
Playing an unhinged hero is one thing. But what’s more exciting is when a star bares his soul and reveals an unsavoury character—especially if he seems to be playing himself. This summer Adam Sandler did it in Funny People, bringing a scary gravitas to his role as a terminally ill comedy star who seemed just like Adam Sandler, and was bitter, ruthless, selfish and spoiled. Not a nice person. Yet Sandler seemed all the more sympathetic for revealing that side of himself. Just as you have to hand it to Douglas, with his rep as a womanizer, for braving a role that cuts so close to the bone.
In a culture of viral amorality, even the most innocent protagonists can’t help but be infected. Take A Serious Man, a black comedy from the Coen brothers. It’s about a scrupulous math professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) whose life unravels as he’s bribed by a student, robbed by his children and betrayed by his wife for an older man who spouts hippie mantras. The movie is set in 1967, in a drab Minnesota suburb, and as the Jefferson Airplane’s Somebody to Love wrings irony from this dark scenario, the hippie dream already seems dead in the water—the beginning of the Big Lie.
Paradoxically, two movies that deliver the brightest glimmer of salvation offer the most harrowing visions of human cruelty—The Road and Precious, two Oscar-pedigree TIFF titles. Based on Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road takes place in a scorched landscape where there is little food, and even less moisturizer, and the moral grime has gotten so thick it’s hard to tell right from wrong. Viggo Mortensen plays a widowed father who roams this cold, charred hell with his young son, trying to protect him from cannibals. The boy has to ask him, “Are we the good guys?” Good question. This devoted father is so fixated on survival that he treats his fellow man with a visceral intolerance the boy finds horrifying.
Hollywood tends to treat the single widowed father as a paragon of male virtue, but even that cliché is now tarnished. In The Boys Are Back, Clive Owen is a bereaved parent struggling to contain his young boy and win back the older son he abandoned along with his first wife. Directed by Scott Hicks (Shine), this drama has a conventional gloss of sentiment. But Owen undercuts it with brutal candour as a savagely flawed, undomesticated dad who has to learn adult responsibility from his own estranged son.
The corollary to all these messed-up men is a new generation of strong female characters—especially in adolescent coming-of-age films. In Britain’s Fish Tank and An Education, two free-spirited teenage girls are seduced by charming predators who worm their way into their families, but the girls refuse to be victims. And in Precious, a scalding drama set in a black American ghetto, a teenage girl (Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe) bears her father’s baby and endures her mother’s abuse as she ekes out salvation by trying to achieve literacy. This tale of female resilience hits like a sobering jolt of shock therapy. Backed by Oprah Winfrey, who will be among the Hollywood royalty at TIFF, it’s vying to be this year’s Slumdog Millionaire.
In cinema’s bleak new world of lost, desperate men, perhaps it’s only fitting that the most unadulterated hero is female.
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