Directed by Jason Reitman

Viewed from the air America cities look beautifully abstract, simple, clean, uncluttered. This is the view we get at the beginning of Up in the Air, a view Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) likes, as his job takes him back and forth across the continent, with only a small percentage of time spent at ‘home'. In voiceover he tells how he delights in his life of hotel rooms and airport lounges, where his only relationships are sexual encounters without strings, and loyalty means a card that gives him precedence over the ordinary mortals who travel with him. His impersonal apartment, when we see it, resembles a downmarket version of the more sumptuous hotel rooms which are his usual resting place.

Bingham works for an agency which large firms call in to break the news to people they are being given the sack, or ‘let go', as it is phrased, implying it is a favour being bestowed. Though this seems a cold-hearted way to earn one's bread, he is no sociopath, but sociable, sleek and handsome, approaching the task like an expert and kindly hangman, to make the inevitable as painless and civilised as possible. He meets his match in self-possessed travelling businesswoman Alex ‘think of me as you with a vagina' Goran (Vera Farmiga) with whom the wisecracks and double entendres crackle, in the mode of a fifties Cary Grant movie (though never with quite the élan or wit).

Another woman in his life is Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a keen freshly graduated recruit with a big new idea - to do the sackings via distant videolink, thereby saving money and time. Anathema to Ryan, of course, as it will mean an end to the rootless life he loves, but he takes her under his fatherly wing to learn the business at first hand, hence seeing the whole business with slightly fresh eyes.

His younger sister's wedding calls him back to his mostly ignored and neglected family, and his cool self-sufficiency begins to thaw as he gets reluctantly involved in the messiness of normal life. Clooney, though never totally believable as the hard case we first meet, comes into his own here as he melts into awkwardness and vulnerability.

The end has been described as redemption, but it's not that. His soul may have been exhumed, but it's also been sentenced to hell. His humanising comes too late, and like the Flying Dutchman, he's condemned to perpetually travelling and never finding the home and warmth he, too late, realises he needs.

Jason Reitman is by no means (as one critic has suggested) the new Billy Wilder, and the film sets out its stall rather obviously, nor is its dialogue as snazzy as it thinks it is, but it's a pleasant, thoughtful film, and nice to see ol' crinkle eyes in top form again.

Seen at Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, 15 January 2010