 |
|||
 |
 |
||
 | |||
 | |||||||||||
|
|
A Buena Vista release. Written by Eric Wald; directed by Bruno Barreto; starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Mark Ruffalo. Released to DVD on September 9, 2003. 
View from the Top is a remarkable film in that absolutely nothing about it is, in any way, remarkable. Taken out of context, the material in View from the Top is smart, smooth and witty. In the film’s trailer, when Gwyneth Paltrow laments to her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend, "You’re breaking up with me… in a birthday card?", it’s quite an amusing moment; her pregnant pause serving to accentuate and amplify the humor of the line. However, in context, the moment is serious to a fault, the aforementioned pause non-existent and the sharp nature of the scene is significantly dulled. This is a marked trend that persists throughout the entirety of View from the Top’s nearly 90-minute running time. Scenes that could have been entertaining and charming are drained of their appeal and characters who should generate feelings of empathy and warmth from the audience instead produce feelings of indifference. Paltrow stars in View from the Top as Donna Jensen, a simple girl from Silver Springs Nevada who yearns to leave her mother’s trailer home as soon as possible. Unfortunately, Jensen possesses no real job skills and has little confidence in herself. That quickly changes when she sees former flight attendant-cum-motivational speaker, Sally Weston (Candice Bergen), preaching the benefits of being a member of the airline service industry. Spurred on by Weston’s advice, Jensen becomes a flight attendant for an extremely small airline before being accepted into the crème de la crème company, Royalty Airlines. With Jensen being emphatically blonde and impervious to the opinions of others, it seems almost inevitable that people will instantly group this film with Legally Blonde (the marketing people certainly have tried to do so). But that comparison misses the subtle humor of View from the Top. The audience isn’t supposed to be laughing with the characters, they are supposed to be laughing at the characters, as was the case in the superbly underrated Drop Dead Gorgeous. When Jensen walks into Weston’s powder room and notices the airplane-shaped guest soaps, it isn’t a moment of enlightenment toward the inner-workings of Weston’s mind, it’s a moment of cartoon foolishness. Strangely, even though this was the common thread present throughout the course of the film and would have given the project a distinct edge, this element was drastically muted in the final cut of the movie. Instead, director Bruno Barreto played up the ‘feel good’ nature of the script, the surprisingly high number of B-list cameos (Rob Lowe, George Kennedy, Jon Polito, Kelly Preston, Stacey Dash and Chad Everett to name a few), Mike Myers’ annoying schtick as an airline trainer with a wandering eye and Jensen’s on-again, off-again romance with Tim Stewart (Mark Ruffalo). With no real direction to the plot, incredibly bland characters and a theme I would be pressed to even call meandering, it isn’t much of a wonder that this film has been sitting on the shelf at Miramax since March of 2001.
jake lever yes, it's true: Since Murphy Brown went off the air in 1998, Candice Bergen has unfortunately appeared in the following, incredibly miserable films: Miss Congeniality, Sweet Home Alabama, View from the Top and The In-Laws. |
| |||||
