More than a century has passed since the Wright Brothers first took off from Kitty Hawk, but flying still retains some of its romantic appeal. Nothing represents freedom better than defying gravity, hurtling hundreds of miles per hour across the sky. The vistas turn towns into toys as you drift through those polymorphous clouds. Life below is an abstract; people are too small to see, so entire cities become depopulated dollhouses. Racking up enough frequent-flyer miles can be like working in the movies; when you live in the realm of fantasy, you’re the envy of those strapped to reality. A refugee from being grounded can leave his commitments—both the drudgeries and securities of day-to-day experience—up in the air. Who’d have thought that so many businessmen inhabit a dreamer’s paradise?

Well, Jason Reitman—who directed Up in the Air, adapted from the Walter Kirn novel by Reitman and Sheldon Turner—for one. His fellow traveler, George Clooney, plays the itinerant, Ryan Bingham, who darts from airport to airport 300 days a year. His job is to fire strangers from their jobs—he’s like a shiny, polished Magnum brandished by cowardly bosses. (Remember: Guns don’t kill people…) A part-time motivational speaker who preaches the virtues of traveling light, Bingham has the salt-and-pepper charm that makes the laid-off feel gently tapped into unemployment rather than thrown face first. Clooney—our closest equivalent to Cary Grant—resembles the lacquered gold-club saloons Bingham frequents. He looks like a man who’s descended from the heavens; he’s as sleek as the glossy pamphlets he distributes. The rough edges of life on the ground would have tarnished him, but the elevated air has been his botox. And yet the victims of his vocation form the toes of his crows’ feet.

Up in the Air is the third, and best, of Reitman’s features. His métier is making plastic people into flesh, but, in the past, his results have been closer to Dr. Frankenstein’s than Pygmalion’s. Juno was supposedly about a sensitive girl who hid her emotions; in reality, it presented a sitcom abhorrence weaned on Youtube and TV commercials. She was a Madison Avenue suit shilling Williamsburg plaids. The 2007 movie—for which the writer was probably more responsible than Reitman—had the same music-to-cut-yourself-to soundtrack as Up in the Air, but Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking (2005) seems more closely related to the new release. I can think of few movies which so avidly accepted smugness and half-baked ideas as satire and common sense, but Thank You’s hero—a tobacco lobbyist—was another corporate crank who, like Bingham, discovered the destructive shallowness of his trade.

Up in the Air is no Thank You. Here, Reitman does not grandstand about Bingham’s morally questionable practice in a morally questionable system; but the director also shirks misstated questions and simplistic answers. His style is slick, but sensitive, too. Rather than hiring professional actors to play the laid off, the production team interviewed real victims of the recession, who were told they were participating in a documentary. In tone and subject matter, the film is indebted to the work of Alexander Payne, particularly About Schmidt and Sideways; but Up in the Air isn’t quite as clever or incisive—or open—perhaps because Reitman’s schmucks are corporate winners, whereas Payne’s are self-condemned losers. Reitman values pathos over perception. Working with a great subject, he’s done a creditable job, but the outcome is ultimately conventional: a high-flying rom-com with a figurative crash landing.

Clooney is well-cast in a solid role. He can’t act silly without his characters seeming doofy (as they did, appropriately, in Burn After Reading and The Men Who Stare at Goats). Bingham, however, is so much more sophisticated and “adult” than anyone else that he ends up seeming perversely immature. Vera Farmiga’s Alex—another frequent flyer and Bingham’s viatic fuck buddy—shares this quality; but Bingham ends up losing her catty games. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen: This is where we bump into some turbulence. When Bingham inevitably wants their relationship to really take off, Alex cancels the flight, saying “You are a break from our normal lives. … an ellipsis.” (Who are the “our” she refers to? Maybe she’s lumping herself in with the people he sacks, but to them he’s probably more of an abrupt period.) All this after Bingham takes her to his sister’s wedding and shows her his old bucolic stomping grounds? Her deceitfulness seems out of character and utterly contrived. Bingham is a sympathetic character, but this walking pink slip’s theretofore rejection of responsibility leaves him no opportunity for parole. At 50, he’s had his first and last chance for—and, apparently, interest in—a permanent relationship. And this with a woman he has met twice, and texted a few times more.

The catalyst for his change of heart—the 23-year-old Natalie (affably, if broadly, played by Anna Kendrick)—is a more interesting character. Her path is the opposite of Bingham’s. Starting off as an ambitious android, she introduces the concept of canning-via-webcam to Bingham’s firm, but comes to learn that her schematic views of life—which includes her own American dream of 1.83 kids and a white-picket fence—are false. Her failure is in settling down too early, Bingham’s in trying too late. However, her eventual need to settle down with a monogamous partner goes unquestioned; it is a lesson reinforced by the unpretentious union forged by Bingham’s sister and her fiancé. Bingham is punished for not compromising, and—ultimately—not conforming; and a film which includes a scene of the hero breaking into his old high school with his grown-up girlfriend, and then breaking a speaking engagement mid-sentence to fly unannounced to her house and proposition her, is not hypocritical in chastening its hero for his nonconformity.

It’s for this reason that, despite its timeliness, Up in the Air—in its assumptions—isn’t really specific to our time in the way that The Wrestler is. In a more optimistic period, Bingham may have gotten his second chance; but whether it’s a bear or bull market, settling down and accepting old-fashioned values is a low-risk commodity. These assumptions don’t make Up in the Air a bad film—far from it. But they restrain it from being an exceptional one. There’s nothing wrong with the concept of settling down and making a home, but as the moral lesson of a movie, it’s pedestrian. Let’s just say that if this was an in-flight movie on an airliner, a couple tears might be shed in the cabin, but few-to-no passengers would object to the selection.

Nevertheless, the makers of Up in the Air may eventually regret their own lost opportunities. We see Zack Galifianakis (who mainstreamed with The Hangover—which used him well, but not to his full psychotic potential) put Clorox in the coffee pot, but he’s there hardly long enough for a cameo. (When Bingham said he’d never see this character again, I hoped Bingham was wrong.) Sam Elliott also pops in as an airline pilot, but his Yosemite Sam mustache and guest-star presence detracts from the poignancy of his scene. Mostly, though, it’s smooth sailing. Reitman’s pleasing, uncontroversial slickness would make him a great pilot; but sometimes, to be a great filmmaker, one has to head straight for the storm clouds.