High-flying corporate downsizer Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) finds himself a victim of the recession in Jason Reitman's timely comedy Up in the Air. (Paramount Pictures)

Up in the Air stars George Clooney as a rootless man who spends his time uprooting others. In Jason Reitman's melancholy new comedy, Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a smooth executive who jets from city to city, firing the employees of downsizing corporations too chicken to do the hatchet work themselves.

Up in the Air is a bittersweet rumination on life's purpose in light of the current economic recession.

Ryan is supremely suited for his role as a flying axeman. A commitment-phobe, he lives out of one carry-on suitcase and has none of the responsibilities of the people whose livelihoods he extinguishes. He's even crafted his no-strings philosophy into a motivational seminar, in which he urges his audiences to empty their metaphorical "backpacks," not just of possessions, but of relationships as well.

It sounds like Buddhist non-attachment, without the resulting enlightenment. In place of that, Ryan has a more mundane goal: he wants to become only the seventh person in the world to rack up 10 million air miles. "More people have walked on the moon," he says, in an effort to impress.

If that sounds at once funny and sad, that's precisely the tone Reitman sustains throughout this unsettling, unsatisfying but deeply felt movie. The writer-director and his co-scenarist, Sheldon Turner, have taken Walter Kirn's high-spirited comic novel from 2001 and redrafted it as a bittersweet rumination on life's purpose in light of the current economic recession. Where Kirn revelled in detailing Ryan's love for his elite in-transit lifestyle, the film skims it quickly, as if embarrassed by its very shallowness. Ryan's witty tips for packing light and breezing through airport security aren't what linger with the viewer, but rather the reactions of the people he has to sack. Reitman includes 22 real victims of downsizing in his firing montages, making the picture at times a sort of semi-documentary that ventures into Michael Moore heart-tugging territory.

The movie is subdued even in its early, playful scenes, where Ryan seemingly finds his female counterpart in — where else? — an airport lounge. Alex (Vera Farmiga) is a fellow frequent flyer, and the two quickly go from comparing club cards to boasting of their exploits in the mile-high club, before retiring to Ryan's hotel room for some wild sex at a less lofty altitude. It's good enough to have them both checking their itineraries and agreeing to another rendezvous the next time their flight paths cross.

Ryan is on his way back to the Omaha headquarters of his company, the Career Transition Corporation, where his boss, Craig (a chilly Jason Bateman), has a nasty surprise. He's hired the aptly named Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick of the Twilight movies), a 23-year-old hotshot fresh from Cornell, who wants to streamline the firing process by doing it remotely via live video. His job — and his air-miles Holy Grail — suddenly threatened, Ryan finds himself forced to take Natalie with him on one last cross-country trip to show her the ropes.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney, left) finds he has much in common with Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), a woman he meets while traveling. (Paramount Pictures)

Under his tutelage, Natalie learns the delicate art of dropping the axe. Like Nick Naylor, the slick tobacco lobbyist in Reitman's debut feature, Thank You for Smoking (2005), Ryan knows how to make a bad thing look good. Job loss is an opportunity, he assures his mortified victims, a chance to realize unfulfilled dreams. Privately, he has no illusions about what he's doing. "We take people at their most fragile," he tells Natalie, "and set them adrift."

Natalie, meanwhile, has just been set adrift herself — dumped by her boyfriend, via text message. There's a beautiful scene where, over a consoling drink with Ryan and Alex, the two women swap romantic ideals. Natalie's shiny vision of the perfect man is countered by the 30-something Alex's diminished expectations. (Some hair on his head would be nice, Alex says, "but that's not a deal-breaker at this point.")

Reitman sprinkles the film with passages like this, where his characters reflect ruefully on love and life and ask, like Alfie, what it's all about. True, Reitman's previous two comedies were no less moody — at times you think Up in the Air is what Juno might've been like stripped of Diablo Cody's quippy dialogue. But this is the closest Reitman has come to out-and-out drama.

This is also Clooney's most introspective comedy performance. As Ryan, he's as dapper and charming as ever, but there's something mechanical about it. Ryan is a thinking man behind the glib self-justifications, and you wonder how he can be fulfilled by his fatuous obsession with collecting points and perks. Inspired by his growing feelings for Alex, he decides to reconnect with his family and attend a sister's wedding in his Wisconsin hometown. We expect some revelation about why Ryan became so emotionally detached, but it never comes.

As the good-humoured, self-possessed Alex, Farmiga brings a warm glow to the screen. Kendrick, meanwhile, is priceless as Ryan's nemesis-turned- protegé. With her little power suits and determinedly serious expression, Natalie is like a kid playing at being a grownup. She's the opposite of Ellen Page's funky, grounded Juno – all sober maturity on the outside, but at a loss the moment the thin carapace is pierced.

Reitman fills the smaller roles with fine comic actors — Danny McBride as the sister's jittery fiancé, Zach Galifianakis and J.K. Simmons as redundant employees who refuse to go quietly — but it's the real people who give the film poignancy. They not only re-enact their responses to being let go, but also discuss their values and what matters most to them.

Up in the Air lives up to its title – it feels uncertain, unfinished, still circling for a place to land. In that way, it's like the lives of those fired people it depicts. Reitman knows this isn't the time for quick-fix happy endings, but for asking a lot of difficult questions.

Up in the Air opens in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver on Dec. 4 and across Canada on Dec. 25.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.