film Corporate cuties: George Clooney and Vera Farmiga in Up in the Air

Directed by Jason Reitman. Starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga,  Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, Chris Lowell, Sam Elliott 15A cert, gen release, 109 min.

Clooney and Farmiga dazzle in this smooth comedy of the recession, writes DONALD CLARKE

JERRY SEINFELD used to do a routine involving that moment when the flight attendant shuts the curtain separating business class from steerage. "If only you'd worked just a littleharder," the stewardess's reproachful eyes seem to tell the economy traveller.

In the era of stunningly cheap flights, you have to go behind that curtain to inject even a modicum of glamour back into air travel. In his slick, funny, ultimately rather sombre follow-up to Juno, Jason Reitman introduces us to a superhumanly composed corporate axe-man named Ryan Bingham.

How suave is Ryan? Well, he is closing in on accumulating 10 million frequent flyer miles, his wallet bulges with a deck of loyalty cards, and he treats four-star hotel bars like his front lounge. Oh, and he’s played by George Clooney.

Up in the Airhits turbulence-free cruising altitude when Ryan meets Alex, a similarly unconnected female executive (a superb Vera Farmiga). "Just think of me as yourself, only with a vagina," she says. Alex is, if anything, an even more perfect representative of the traveller behind the holy curtain. We never hear her job description, and we suspect that such information, coiled in corporate obfuscation, would leave us none the wiser. Document Management Consultant? Resource Slippage Administrator? Interpersonal Manipulation Officer?

At any rate, hammering laptops after hammering one another, the travellers come across as the perfect globalised screwball couple: a wireless, hands-free Hepburn and Tracy.

At moments such as this, you have to remind yourself that Up in the Airis a comedy of the recession. Loosely adapted from a novel by Walter Kim, the film begins with a series of talking heads – real citizens downsized in the corporate killing fields of Detroit and St Louis – explaining what unemployment will mean for them.

They are the reason Ryan spends his life in the air. The star player at a firm that, among other gruesome tasks, handles the sacking of its client companies' surplus employees, Ryan prides himself on the efficiency and sensitivity of his terminations. He is, thus, appalled when a young, inexperienced colleague (Anna Kendrick) – so inexperienced she checks luggageinto the hold when flying – suggests that, henceforth, all sackings be carried out from head office via a video link.

It’s not clear what appals Ryan more: the impersonal nature of the new practices or the fact that he will now have to spend time in his soulless apartment. The ingenue and the old hand set out on a trip together, but compromise comes slowly and grudgingly.

There is a rather delightful ambiguity at the heart of Up in the Air. As the film progresses and Ryan becomes closer to Alex, the appeal of the business-lounge lifestyle starts to wear thin and the hero allows himself to consider yielding to commitment. (The revelation sets in during a family wedding that looks a little too much like every wedding in faux-indie cinema and, in its blue-collar ordinariness, goes too far in demystifying the crisp-suited hero.)

Because we’ve seen so many films about apparently carefree rogues, we assume that any such surrender to the mainstream – wife, car, goldfish – is ultimately something to be desired. But, by casting the Emperor of Slick, the Mandarin of Singlehood, the Sultan of the Unattached as the hero, Reitman instils a degree of doubt in the viewer’s mind. Don’t try and tell the punter that he (or she) would rather be Fred MacMurray than George Clooney.

Sure, Ryan’s lifestyle seems laminated and soulless when set beside those of the recently sacked. This does, however, remain an existence worth envying.

If only you had worked just a little harder . , ,