Are you one of the many who have been laid off, fired, sacked, or otherwise sent to an unemployment office in the past year? You’ve probably had more than one revenge fantasy about whomever it was that delivered the news to you. In Up in the Air, writer/director Jason Reitman paints a target on George Clooney’s back and challenges his audience to identify with a guy who delivers this kind of bad news for a living to total strangers.

Clooney’s Ryan Bingham spends over 300 days a year on the road tearing apart peoples’ lives in between speaking engagements where he espouses a personal philosophy of calculated solitude and detachment. It’s a philosophy that has served him well, as a man with a collection of VIP travel club cards, who is more at home in an airport Admiral’s club lounge or a hotel bar than in the spartan apartment he keeps back “home” in Omaha. It’s a testament to Clooney’s charm (and the seemingly effortless wit of Reitman’s script) that not only do we not hate Ryan, but we like him in spite of ourselves.

Ryan’s job, being an efficient and tactful executioner, is, on the surface, incidental to the story. It provides a reason for him to be constantly on the road, and the sets the table for the hook that drives the plot, in the form of Natalie (Anna Kendrick), a whip-smart business school phenom who thinks Ryan’s company can slash costs by firing people via teleconference. Ryan takes her on the road to demonstrate the importance of doing this work in person. For a time, Up in the Air seems like it’s going to be a fairly standard odd couple road movie, with a side of romantic comedy in the form of Alex (Vera Farmiga), another constant traveler who challenges Ryan’s no-strings lifestyle via a burgeoning romance in their occasional meetings and late night text messages.