In the Christmas movie “Up in the Air,” George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a guy who works for a company that specializes in firing people. Whenever massive layoffs are due and the corporation doing the firing doesn’t want to burden its managers with the odious task (or plans to fire the managers too), Bingham steps in and does the job for them.

The title of the film comes in part from the fact that Bingham spends most of his life on planes en route to this or that corporate disaster scene, so much so that “up in the air” has become home for him. When he’s not firing people, he rents himself out for motivational seminars he calls “What’s in your backpack?” in which he advises his audience to cut all personal ties, dump all possessions and live lightly enough to carry their entire lives on their backs.

Kind of like he does.

“Make no mistake,” he cautions, echoing the ubiquitous and obnoxious manual Who Moved My Cheese?, “Movement is life. You stop moving, you die.”

The film is filled with scenes of face to face terminations that are gut-wrenching and familiar, some staged, some real, but the best part (and the worst part) of “Up in the Air” is the characters, all of whom will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever worked in a cube farm or phone center.

When 20-something, freshly-graduated Natalie Keener comes up with a plan to script the company’s product and take it online (thus saving millions of dollars each year in plane fare, hotels, and meal allowances, and not-so-coincidentally turning Ryan’s beloved up in the air job into a call center position that can be performed without leaving a 6x6 cubicle in Omaha), Ryan suddenly finds himself on the receiving end of what he’s been paid so well for so long to dish out.

In a last ditch effort to save his own job, he convinces his boss (played with revolting but dead-on corporate smarminess by Jason Bateman) to let him take Natalie on the road and show her ‘the personal side’ of work she thinks can be summarily dispatched with a flow chart, a script, and an internet connection.

The irony of this task is delicious all by itself, but Anna Kendrick as Natalie Keener is amazing. I recognized Natalie immediately. I have worked with this young woman at least half a dozen times in many identical corporate environments, every single one of them as heartless and bland and deadly as the world of this film. It was the character of Natalie and Kendrick’s performance of that character that really brought the sometimes overly-clever script to life for me.

Natalie is blissfully yet brittley unaware of subtext in all forms. She has swallowed the corporate line hook and all without realizing that it is now deeply embedded in her liver. She cannot know that it will inevitably be yanked out, along with most of her internal organs, with excruciating efficiency. Her inexperience and youth allows this to happen without her even realizing it, and Clooney’s character Ryan recognizes this fact as deeply and surely as he recognizes that making that point to his boss won’t help him one iota.

So off they go. Up in the air.

Some of the best scenes in the film involve the dismantling and destruction of Natalie, yet a tenderness shines through that task that is also recognizable and real. Natalie’s implosion is prerequisite to the possibility of her ever living a human life. The irony of course is that while Clooney’s character sees that he can open up this possibility for Natalie, he is not living that possibility himself, cannot live it, and doesn’t even want it.

For Ryan Bingham, it’s already too late.

In an early scene, before the plot unfolds, we see Clooney on a plane sipping a drink. The stewardess comes by and chirps,

“Do you want the cancer?”

“What?” Clooney asks. So she repeats it, twice.

And then, finally, she holds up an aluminum Coke can and asks for the final time,

“Do you want the can, sir?”

Well, do you?