We are not swans.

About a month ago now, I went to the local IMAX theater to finally see Avatar in 3-D. And as is sometimes customary, I lollygagged and left a little late. Waiting in the longer-than-I-expected line, everyone in front of me was waiting to get tickets to the same film. As the gentleman behind the glass reminded each person that the movie was going to start in 5 minutes, then 3 minutes, then one minute, I resigned myself to the fact I would need to see something else. As I surveyed the red lights of the showtimes displayed behind the single box-office attendant, I landed on Up in the Air. I had seen Jason Reitman's third feature, which stars George Clooney, around Christmas and had already held it in high regard after that first screening. So I decided to give it a second look.

George Clooney's character, Ryan Bingham, is not unlike the public persona the actor himself possesses--charming, confident, perpetually single. Ryan works for CTC, a company hired out by businesses to fire or layoff its employees. Ryan is one of a couple of dozen CTC employees who fly all over the country for most of the year to do the face-to-face terminations. Like many of us (at least those of us who are lucky to have a job), Ryan's life is his work. "To know me is to fly with me," he says. "This is where I live." When a pilot asks him where he's from, he says "here."

Two complications arise that threaten to figuratively and literally ground Ryan's way of life. The first comes in the form of the arrival of a young upstart named Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick). Natalie's proposal that CTC conducts all of its terminations through video conferencing will effectively end his traveling ways and keep him in the company's home base of Omaha, where he keeps an apartment furnished with little more than a toaster, a toothbrush, and some extra sets of matching suits. But first he must show her the ropes, going city-to-city, sitting face-to-face with the people they must fire. Then midway through their travels they hook up with the second complication, Alex (Vera Farmiga), a business woman who Ryan met earlier and shares his jetsetting, sex-with-no-strings-attached lifestyle.

Natalie and Alex represent two separate phases of woman adulthood--in fact, two different ideals. Natalie, early 20s, recently graduated from college, wants the traditional life: husband, kids, dog, SUV, suburbs. She admits (and only slightly begrudgingly so) that she defines herself by her relationship with a man. Alex, in her late 30s, is successful, worldly, and independent. She's essentially the female equivalent to Ryan. "Just think of me as you, but with a vagina," she tells him over the phone.

Yet while the movie sets up the two women as binary opposites, their characters are so fully drawn that we begin to realize that there is significant overlap, that they don't represent two ends of a spectrum, but a gamut of emotions in between. And the movie doesn't condescend to any of the varying degrees. There is a nice conversation between the two of them shortly after they first meet where they talk about what they want, the kind of future they envision, they kind of men they are looking for. Ryan is present and interjects occasionally, but we really get to know Alex and Natalie.

The film has a genuine affection for all of the people who inhabit it and all of their points of view. For instance, Ryan's sister Julie and her fiancé Jim at first come off as a bit goofy and oddball, but we slowly get to know them and even understand an apparently cheesy wedding project they've asked their friends to undertake. Ryan even, the perpetual bachelor, must come to the rescue when Jim gets cold feet. And his attempt to get him to the altar is similarly genuine, even if he doesn't necessarily subscribe to it as it applies to himself.

To me, the magic of Hollywood doesn't exist necessarily in its ability to transport you to new and faraway lands or offer tales of wonder and grand adventure. Don't get me wrong, there is greatness to be found in those types of films, certainly--films such as The Wizard of Oz, or Star Wars, or, yes, Avatar. But I believe the classics of Hollywood cinema come out of a tradition that finds a balance between the serious matters of its contemporary world and light, frothy entertainment.

Up in the Air has already been compared by many to the works of Preston Sturges and Frank Capra, directors who made the wittiest and most enjoyable comedies in the history of film, all the while engaging with the social realities of the depression, during which many of these pictures were set and made. I'd even include some of the works of Billy Wilder, who deftly mixed sarcastic cynicism and a weary, guarded optimism.

As reticent as I am to immediately anoint contemporary films to the level of these established classics, I have to say I kind of agree with it here. That all of this happens over the sobering reality of the downsizing I feel may seem to some as dismissive or even smug, but instead of being what could have been a garish collision of these two sensibilities--the light, almost screwball threesome of Ryan, Alex, and Natalie and the darker moments of the layoff scenes--the film is a smart and tasteful mix of the two. I'm not sure the film has anything new to say about the world we live in today (the current state of the economy, anyway), but it does seem to get the breadth of human experience--the range of it allowed us. In that way, Up in the Air isn't so much deep as it is wide. But that's a big reason why I see it as the movie of this particular moment--the one Hollywood movie that most captures how broad life is today. And that the film is open to that sentiment is a bit of a miracle.

Up in the Air (Jason Reitman, 109 m)