“Moving is living,” intones corporate downsizer-turned-motivational speaker Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) to his captivated crowd with the weight of gospel. “We are not swans. We are sharks.”

Bingham, played by the preposterously well-aged Clooney, champions this lifestyle of extreme detachment and mobility in writer/director Jason Reitman’s new dramedy “Up in the Air,” which is slated for a Dec. 25 release.

As in his previous films (“Thank You For Smoking,” “Juno”), Reitman embraces the duplicity of human nature in a complicated — and, more often than not, comical — study of a societal misfit. Bingham is, by objective description, a miserly, smug and slick hyperbole of a heartless bastard whose sole occupation is physically informing victims of corporate downsizing. Yet his intelligence, charming arrogance and, above all, his pitiable choice of solitude lend Bingham a complexity that fully merits an investigation of character.

Even more so than with his first two films, Reitman plays “Up in the Air” close to the chest: with co-writer Sheldon Turner, he personally adapted the script from Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel of the same name, and as a result, projects something of himself onto Bingham’s highly complex character.

In fact, I was graced with the opportunity to speak with Reitman about this very topic, among others, this Wednesday in his Four Seasons Hotel Atlanta suite. Swaddled in a checkered flannel and knit beanie, Reitman brazenly channeled his inner Canuck, but that only gave me minor pause in conducting the interview.

After pleasantries, Reitman admitted, “I see a lot of myself in [Bingham] frankly. I’m a guy who loves to travel and is always dealing with the dilemma of whether to live a settled-down life as part of a community or to be alone, unplugged.”

Reitman further builds the case of Bingham as his likeness by explaining the six-year process of transforming Kirn’s novel to film, and how his personal experiences informed the script’s content.

“When I first started writing this, I was a single guy living in an apartment,” he said. “By the time I was finished writing, I was married, I had a child, I had a mortgage, you know. My life had become infinitely more complicated, and Ryan’s character kind of changed along with it and he discovered epiphanies as I did.”

Indeed, Bingham initially enjoys a life sterilized of relationships, drifting through indistinguishable terminals towards the next Hilton Hotel that is more his home than his apartment in Omaha, where he spends a mere “43 miserable days” a year.

However exaggerated his lifestyle seems, Bingham is married to it. That is, until he meets two women who inflict equally damaging blows to his philosophy: Natalie (Anna Kendrick, “Twilight”), the office newcomer and expert in efficiency, and Alex (Vera Farmiga, “Orphan”), his jet-setting mirror image. But where the former femme shakes the foundations of his heartless vocation, the latter launches Bingham into a lifestyle self-analysis that takes up the lion’s share of the film.

Reitman employed the women strategically, with the logic that “if we’re going to challenge this guy’s point of view that life is better left alone, we’re going to need two striking women to really put it to him.”

As in his previous films, “Up in the Air” addresses head-on such discomforting topics as the fear of mortality and of dying alone, the helplessness of humanity and the need for a purpose no matter how hollow. This is precisely what distinguishes “Up in the Air” from other Hollywood fodder.

The humble Reitman, though, gives much of the credit to the actors. In rewriting Kirn’s novel for the screen, he penned parts for eight characters with specific actors in mind. Reitman said that at the script’s beginning, “I was not arrogant enough to think that [Clooney] would do the movie. But I always wrote it for him.”

The director’s optimistic casting unquestionably paid off, with Clooney in a role tailored for him, especially his effortless confidence and endearing smirk. Furthermore, Reitman attributed the effectiveness of the actors to their conscious restraint in judging their own roles, a subtlety that “takes really smart actors, and [Clooney, Farmiga and Kendrick] are really bright.”

In many ways, for Reitman, contradiction is the name of the game. The uncommon marriage of A-list stars and a meticulous, genuinely funny script propels “Up in the Air” to the forefront of recent cinema. Part of this can be attributed to Reitman’s attitude about his particular brand of filmmaking.

“I make films that are about unusual subject matter — tobacco lobbying, teenage pregnancy, corporate termination experts. But I do them in an accessible way,” he said.

Indeed, “Up in the Air” is poignant yet hilarious, charming yet gritty, smart yet accessible, familiar yet fresh and, above all, unpredictable. Reitman continues to demonstrate his uncanny ability to capture humanity in all of its inconsistencies, and one can only hope that the inevitable success of this latest film will alert Hollywood to the fact that — as Reitman has proved yet again — a film can be both meticulously crafted and commercially viable.

— Contact Robert Flowers.