Just before we all got distracted by the festive season, everyone I knew was talking about getting the sack. Even film critics. We talked about who'd got the sack; who we'd like to see get the sack. We waited and wondered: when is it my turn? Now the director Jason Reitman and the screenwriter Sheldon Turner have taken Walter Kim's novel about people being fired and - with many changes - turned it into a funny and moving film for our sack-anxious times.
The film deals with the casual cruelty of corporations, but, unlike Michael Clayton, in which George Clooney also played a corporate Mr Fix-it, Up in the Air never comes on like a big moral drama full of its own self-importance. That's not Reitman's style. He's a curious cocktail of right-wing libertarianism and liberal compassion. In the culture wars that dominate American life, I suspect he is a double agent, working for both sides. In Thank You for Smoking, he gave us an attractive lobbyist for Big Tobacco; in Juno, he was on the side of a pregnant teenage girl.
Here we have Clooney playing a smooth-talking, high-flying hit man, Ryan Bingham. His job is to make sure you lose your job: he's hired by companies who want an outsider to come in and fire their staff. He terminates jobs with a sincere smile and a slick line of patter. You know those airline ads for executive class, where smiling geisha-like girls wave you into the hot tub of stress-free travel? That's Ryan's life. He smoothly sails past long queues, check-ins and checkouts, accumulating the ultimate reward for a life lived in the air: travel-mileage points. He's a man who has so downsized his life - no children, no wife, no committed relationships, an empty flat - he has nothing left. You could say he is a shallow man who is all surface and no soul - and he would thank you for the compliment.
Ryan, who has a sideline as a motivational speaker, finds his life of non-attachment a kind of liberation. He is the restless American, forever on the road and in the air, finding meaning in continual movement. As he tells his audience: "We're not swans, we're sharks."
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Okay, it's not as memorable a line as Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good", but whereas Oliver Stone likes his capitalist devils to be larger than life, Reitman likes his appalling men to be appealing. With his love of credit cards and vast knowledge of car-hire firms, Ryan is more Geeko than Gekko. One minute, we are appalled at the way he dispatches employees; the next, we're laughing at his masterclass in the art of travelling through airport security checks. "Never get in line behind old people - their bodies are littered with metal."
And Reitman and Turner aren't afraid to have Bingham make persuasive sense, even when he's wielding the axe. Of one disgruntled employee (the always excellent JK Simmons), he asks: "How much did they pay you to give up on your dreams?"
Ryan's unattached, airborne life is threatened when Natalie (Anna Kendrick), the new whiz-kid at his company, comes up with the time- and money-saving idea of firing people by video link. Ryan is appalled, but the boss (Jason Bateman) orders him to take Natalie on the road, to get a first-hand look at what he does. There, Ryan meets the beautiful Alex (Vera Farmiga), a female version of himself - they share a passion for credit cards and commitment-free sex. Slowly, he starts to develop feelings for her and, while attending his sister's wedding, begins to re-examine his life. Have no fear, though, Reitman doesn't cop out at the end.
Up in the Air is a film that looks at a heartless world with plenty of heart, although I have a few doubts about its method. We hear and see the heartfelt testimonies of employees who have been sacked, and Reitman has mixed real people telling their true stories with actors. What's the point of that? It's easy to provoke an emotion in your audience by parading these weeping men and depressed women. (Then again, why shouldn't the cinema make room for the human face of the statistics we read about in our daily papers?) And the film's ultimate message that life is better lived with someone else is a bit bland, a modern version of EM Forster's "Only connect".
That said, there's so much here to enjoy. Chemistry is one of the most overused words in a critic's vocabulary, but Clooney and Farmiga have it. It should provoke a kind of romantic envy among the audience. Farmiga's performance is superb; she manages to be a ballsy, independent woman without being a ball-breaking monster. And Clooney is at his best, playing against type and managing to show the emptiness beneath that famous charm of his. For Ryan is ultimately a tragic figure, a man who can't put into practice the life lessons he tries to teach others.
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15, 109 mins