By STEPHEN HOLDEN | The New York Times | December 18, 2009
![Michael Haneke's “White Ribbon” scrutinized abuses in a German village before World War I. Other 2009 movies examined unemployment and the war in Iraq. [Sony Pictures Classics]](http://www.rcareygersten.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Post-2009MoviePicks.jpg "Post-2009MoviePicks")
Michael Haneke's “White Ribbon” scrutinized abuses in a German village before World War I. Other 2009 movies examined unemployment and the war in Iraq. Sony Pictures Classics
With its wisecracks and tart screwball banter between Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a termination facilitator hired by companies to do their downsizing dirty work, and his fellow frequent flier and sometime lover Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), “Up in the Air” has the trappings of a romantic comedy. But as Bingham dispassionately fires longtime employees played by actual victims of downsizing, what emerges is an indelible collective portrait of the chilly impersonality of American corporate life in the 21st century. In a shark-infested sink-or-swim culture where profits and stock price are everything, the bottom line trumps human values.
In “The Messenger” Ben Foster plays a soldier whose job it is to ring doorbells and break the news to families that a relative has died in combat. As you watch Mr. Foster’s character, who’s accompanied by a hot-headed fellow officer (Woody Harrelson), repeat a carefully scripted ritual whose strict rules bar physical contact with the bereaved, you are confronted with explosive anguish as the devastating news is absorbed. The harrowing scenes of people crumpling are only slightly softened by a sense of relief that the human cost of our overseas adventures is finally being acknowledged in movies without a veneer of sentimentality and flag waving.
These two films suggest that when times get really hard, reality will eventually leak through the cracks in our official culture of denial. Until forced to do otherwise, we would rather pruriently rubber-neck Tiger Woods’s misadventures than to confront real human tragedy. To this critic, truthfulness in films, no matter how painful, is preferable to sugar-coated reality paraded as art.
Rean on: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/movies/20holden.html?_r=1&ref=movies