Barreto’s View From the Top feels like the long wait before finding out that your flight has been cancelled.
I find it hard to believe that an Academy Award win for Best Actress followed up by some fine performances in Neil LaBute’s Possession and Wes Andersons’ The Royal Tenenbaums can lead to this—a meaningless role in a film that has the potential of exploring a world of flight attendant in the same way that Heckerling’s Clueless gave us the teenage girl viewpoint of high-school.
Apparently, no actor is immune to picking a bad film role such as the case for Gwyneth Paltrow who seems completely out of the place in this ensemble movie by a director who seems to have a knack for romantic comedies. Director Bruno Barreto who brought us the climatic, suspense-filled film of Four Days in September, gives us a comedy which flies very low on the “enjoyment†radar screen.
Donna (Paltrow-Shallow Hal) goes from trailer park trash to finally making it into the world of warm nuts and headsets. Her course into the grand career debuts with her ridiculous big hair Dallas Cowboy cheerleader and Hooter girl with and plenty of cleavage look for a crappier airline. From this point on, the film follows through with a generic film narrative that introduces a bunch of characters that we never care about, and unfortunately for a film which is supposed to be a comedy non of the cast turn out to be funny with the exception of Mike Myers (Shrek) who provides us with a half dozen chuckles. In the case of Paltrow, she is hardly the material for a comedic picture and she lacks the charisma that it takes to carry a picture.
Barreto has a golden opportunity here to give us a full-out mockery of the whole airline industry trade, but the narrative is too busy falling back on this boring subplot and unimaginative love-story then giving us some authentic ‘ha-ha’ moments. Perhaps more of Myers as a “disgruntled passenger†could have made the film worthwhile, but the protagonist’s series of trials and tribulations is awfully predictable and comes off awfully tiresome, — it’s too bad that the attention they put into the costume design wasn’t mirrored into making some sort of flagrantly sardonic feature without an instrumental tribute track to Cyndi Lauper’s ever famous, Time after Time and the one too many references to the city of Cleveland.
Unfortunately, View From the Top is a film that never ‘takes off’ and meanwhile Miramax is making audiences wait even longer for their riskier slate of films like Prozac Nation and Buffalo Soldiers, which are a perhaps a harder sell because of the twisted sense of humour, but at least they don’t seem to lack in the originality department.