VIEW FROM THE TOP

A spunky young woman fights her way to the front rank of flight attendants but discovers there's no such thing as having it all.

CAST: Gwyneth Paltrow, Christina Applegate, Mark Ruffalo, Kelly Preston, Candice Bergen, Joshua Malina, Mike Myers
DIRECTOR: Bruno Barreto

"This crass, grimly unfunny comedy stars Gwyneth Paltrow as Donna Jensen, a small-town dreamer who hopes to fly high by becoming a flight attendant…before long she's up, up and away, following her destiny, while the movie is down, down and away, plumbing its degradation …‘View From the Top’ is worth commenting on only for its shocking ineptitude…Given the choppy editing and abbreviated running time, it seems certain that chunks of story have gone missing, but that can't explain why in one scene the dialogue doesn't match an actor's mouth…It's puzzling what Barreto thought he was doing in and with ‘View From the Top,’ but the greater mystery is why Paltrow would agree to appear in material that's so beneath her…‘View From the Top’ couldn't look uglier and its star couldn't look worse." --Manohla Dargis, The Los Angeles Times

''‘View From the Top’ is a romantic comedy with all the confectionary value of one of those watery diet shakes; it practically evaporates while you're watching it…’View From the Top’ takes place -- or pretends to -- in contemporary America, yet it's stuck in a faux nostalgia for upwardly mobile second-class citizenship for women… the movie is a piece of spring piffle that makes your average Nora Ephron cookie-cutter romance look like ‘It Happened One Night.’ --Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

"What is Gwyneth Paltrow doing squandering her talents on a wan little airline comedy like ‘View From the Top’? This satire of flight attendants and their career problems is so toothless and scatterbrained that it doesn't really deserve to be called a satire. What keeps it watchable is the unquenchable charm of its star…Even wearing big hair and putting on the hint of a working-class accent, this actress exudes too much refinement for the role." --Stephen Holden, The New York Times

"Four years to the day after winning an undeserved Oscar for ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ Gwyneth Paltrow crash-lands with ‘View From the Top’--a dire stewardess comedy that's the movie equivalent of airline food. It seems awfully like career suicide for the patrician actress to again impersonate upwardly mobile trailer trash--as she did in her arguably worst movie, ‘Duets.’ She's even less well cast as a naive teenager, to the point where her demeanor and increasingly lined, impassive face suggest nothing so much as the bored trophy wife she portrayed in yet another clunker, ‘A Perfect Murder’…Miramax should make a contribution to the war effort by dropping prints of this bomb on Baghdad." --Lou Lumenick, The New York Post

"It's meant to be funny. It's not, or not particularly. It's meant to be cute. Maybe it is, but I hate cute. It's meant to be harmless fluff. It is…At heart, ‘View From the Top’ is a how-to guide for office success. It demonstrates how Donna (Paltrow) makes it to her goal, and what conspired to keep her from it, what hard choices she had to make on the way. Though candy-colored, it's not without some wisdom." --Stephen Hunter, The Washington Post

"It's an upbeat tale about achieving independence and living the American Dream, made by and starring people for whom actually being a flight attendant probably holds as much appeal as dining on airline food…Why Paltrow, who was accepting a best actress Oscar four years ago, would take this clumsily written role is anyone's guess… despite her natural warmth, you can't escape the sense that she's slumming here." --Mark Caro, The Chicago Tribune