There should be more films like Up in the Air, a bittersweet drama that subverts a traditional story. Its main character is Ryan Bingham (Clooney), a handsome, ageing outsider who flies around the United States firing people whose bosses are too gutless to talk to their employees themselves. Both he and his routine are slick and polished, and perhaps his only goal in life is to reach ten million air-miles. He is having a temporary fling with a businesswoman named Alex (Farmiga), who matches him for sass and stress. Nothing fazes Ryan in the people he deals with – not anger, not tears, not suicide threats. He has a schedule, a life set-up, and he sticks to it. Then Natalie (Kendrick) arrives at his office, a scarily self-assured, ambitious Ivy League grad. She gets every letter-goer in the team brought back to headquarters to witness her new direction for the company – iFiring – video link-ups to anywhere in the country and remote terminations of contract without ever leaving the room. Ryan reacts furiously to the news that his itinerant lifestyle will be destroyed, and so their boss (Bateman) sends both of them on one of the final scheduled trips together in the interest of compromise.

Apologies for giving away so much of the initial plot, but the film is a difficult one to summarize. It’s a snap-shot of a man midway through his life, with dead-ends, disappointments and, despite Ryan’s slickness, no neat terminations. The joy with which all the middle-aged couples in the cinema chuckled at the Ryan/Alex relationship, as if the energetic coupling of two physically flawless high-flyers had anything to do with them, was actually nauseating.

One of the central themes of Reitman’s film is the gradual drift into responsibilities, decisions and situations which you never expected, as when Ryan attends his sister’s wedding and has to counsel his brother-in-law out of his existential angst and resulting cold feet. You can maintain a distance as much as you like, you can even create a whole lifestyle which is about distance, but you cannot hide from life. As well as having an excellent script and flawless casting, the production value of Up in the Air is incredible, with even the most mundane sequence of Ryan’s quotidian air travel made glossy, with soundtrack, aerial shots and Clooney’s crooning voiceover. Perhaps for the purpose of easeful marketing Reitman compared this film to Lost In Translation, but it is a far cleverer, more mature examination of crisis and transition, and should receive as many awards as the cast can carry.