Although I loved Juno, I think that Up in the Air is Jason Reitman's strongest movie to date.  I couldn't even tell you the plot of Thank You For Smoking even though I remember thinking it was pretty watchable.  Juno was great, but some of that owed to a snappy script from a fresh screenwriter.  In fact, I had no idea that Reitman had directed both of those movies, and Up in the Air is an odd but welcome addition to that already-impressive list.  It doesn't feel quite as cynical as his first film, but it's not quite as much fun as his second.  If I can see one trend amongst Reitman's movies so far, it's that he doesn't force happy endings, but he isn't beating his characters down either.

George Clooney plays a professional axe-man.  He travels 300+ days out of the year to fire people for a living.  When his company wants to switch to an impersonal, online mechanism for carrying out its work, Clooney has to take the fresh-faced newcomer who came up with the online idea out on the road to show her the ropes.  Firing people is messy business, and the young protege clearly only knows the business from books and models.  It's a typical setup where the older veteran shows the new hotshot how things work and in the process, each learns a little something from the other.  Except, it doesn't play out the way these movies always do.

Colors went down this road, but when Sean Penn repeated Robert Duvall's joke from the beginning of the movie to a newer guy at the end, it smacked of filmmaking contrivance.  Reitman manages to take this predictable arrangement and breath some life into it, making it funny and touching but mostly true.  I love that the film has characters that go through a real story arc, and that it leaves people in places at the end of the story that are more interesting than the places where they started.  I also love that it's not a tidy film, that everything doesn't wrap up perfectly at the end--there's some closure but I get the sense that this story for these characters isn't completely over.

Up in the Air is one of my favorite movies of the year--not because it was wildly entertaining like Zombieland or Black Dynamite and not because it was 'important' or groundbreaking work from an auteur--but because it's a dead-on-the-nose story about people that I could know, and it's told with enough warmth that even when those people make bad decisions, I want them to come out OK on the other side.