Air is dangerously thin in 'View from the Top'

Gwyneth Paltrow, in "View from the Top," accomplishes a seemingly impossible feat: She's in a movie that's slimmer than she is.

As Donna, a big-haired young woman from a dead-end Nevada town who dreams of becoming a flight attendant ("First class. International. Paris."), she gives a sweet, earnest performance without seeming to notice that there's nothing surrounding her — that the rest of the movie, for some reason, isn't there.

Not that there's no one else around: there's Mark Ruffalo as Donna's lazy-voiced love interest (he's charming as always, though you do want to urge him to take a nap), Candice Bergen as her flight-attendant mentor, Christina Applegate as her scheming pal, and a mugging Mike Myers (is there any other kind?) as a sight-impaired instructor at the Royalty Airlines Training Center, where Donna pursues her dream.

But despite the actors' efforts, they're all stick figures, showing up in the plot where needed to provide romance, inspiration, conflict and humor, respectively. When not required, they vanish, sometimes rather suddenly. Kelly Preston, in the movie's early minutes, seems to be set up as a major character (a fellow flight attendant), and then she just disappears, never to be seen again. Perhaps she got an offer for a better movie.

Director Bruno Barreto ("Bossa Nova") clearly wasn't going for realism here, and that's fine; the candy-colored, skin-tight costumes and goofy sets are the most entertaining part of the movie. (It's not always easy, though, to tell what decade this hyper-stylized film is set in — it seems to careen from early '70s to an uneasy mid-'90s style, though no time passes.)

But over-the-top comedy needs to go somewhere — if not over the top, at least near the rim. And "View from the Top" just sits there, barely bubbling, substituting Day-Glo costumes for wit.

Myers' cross-eyed shtick — which feels, at times, almost improvised — grows old, as most shticks do, and he's got nothing else here to fall back on.

And Paltrow's winsome, gamely goofy presence isn't enough to keep "View from the Top" aloft. Donna achieves her dream, and finds true love and sleek hair along the way; too bad she couldn't have found some real comedy. Audiences today need it, badly.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com