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The Air I Breathe Our rating: Your rating:   Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for violence, language and some sexual content/nudity) Genre: Drama Theater release: January 25, 2008 by ThinkFilm Directed by: Bryan Gunnar Cole Runtime: 1 hour 37 minutes Cast: Kevin Bacon (Love), Forest Whitaker (Happiness), Brendan Fraser (Pleasure), Sara Michelle Gellar (Sorrow), Andy Garcia (Fingers) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

I love movies like this. But, sad to say, I didn't love this movie. I hoped I would, but one clunker after another kept accumulating—a hackneyed character here, a stupid line of dialogue there—until it was sounding like a sneaker in a dryer.

That's too bad, because this format has been the foundation of some terrific, thought-provoking films. You take a sizeable number of characters, most of whom have never met, and set their stories in motion. As the multiple plots unfold, each character is being drawn closer to the center, where a resolution awaits that, in the best of these films, can be simultaneously unexpected and inevitable.

Forest Whitaker as Happiness

Let's coin a term and call them "drawstring" movies, a subset of the genre known as "ensemble" films. Among the best examples are Robert Altman's Nashville (1976) and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999), but even those that fall shorter, like Love Actually (2003) or Grand Canyon (1991), can still tantalize and endear, because the format itself provides such rich possibilities.

Some drawstring films have truly sprawling casts—in Nashville there are 24 main characters—but The Air I Breathe proposes something more tidy. There are four main characters, and they bear the names Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, and Love. These represent what is termed a "Chinese proverb," that these are the basic four emotions of life. (Seems a bit truncated for a proverb, doesn't it? I'd call it a list.)

Brendan Fraser as Pleasure, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Sorrow

As each character is introduced, the emotion he or she represents appears onscreen, though what we're looking at may seem contradictory. For example, the film begins with a shot of Forest Whitaker slumped against a wall, sobbing, holding a gun; then the word "Happiness" flashes onscreen. He tells us in voiceover that in childhood he knew "the secret to a happy life:" obey the rules and work hard. "And if you work hard in school, your reward is—more school." At this point there's a nifty sequence: the camera glides continuously to the right and reveals him, first, as a child writing at his desk in an elementary-school classroom, then as an adolescent in a middle-school classroom, and then as a young adult in a college classroom. "And after more school," his voice goes on, "you are given the best that life has to offer"—the camera comes to rest to reveal him seated in the middle of a huge desk-farm of an office. He's not happy.

Let's continue with this Happiness sequence, because it illustrates what is both faulty and impressive about this film. It won't spoil much, since the scene comes at the beginning and takes only fifteen minutes, but if you want to preserve every bit of suspense, you'd better stop reading here.

Kevin Bacon as Love

In the plus column, we can note that Whitaker is terrific in the role—his "Happiness" is a timid, gentle, habit-bound creature, who quickly wins our sympathy. He happens to be in the bathroom one day when some co-workers duck in to discuss a fixed horse-race. (They glance under the doors but he has pulled his feet up onto the toilet seat.) He decides that he has to take a risk if he's going to achieve happiness, and bets on "Butterfly"—in fact, bets more than he can pay. But the horse stumbles, the race is lost, and Happiness winds up in a shadowy den being threatened by a mob boss. Why did he bet on "Butterfly"? Trembling, he explains: "Because I heard my co-workers … and," voice dropping, "I like butterflies."

There's a lot to admire in the "Happiness" story, and if you stick with the movie you'll continue to get rewards along that line, although in a diminishing train. So what's crummy? The basic thesis of this sequence—for example, that this shy character would arrive at true happiness by robbing a bank and being shot down by cops. It's just not true that taking a risk brings happiness even if you lose, and it would seem the character had already learned this, when the mob boss, Fingers, was shoving him around.

Andy Garcia as Fingers

Yep, he's named "Fingers," just one of many elements that might have been generated by a screenwriting-for-dummies software program. Here's some more: a patient climbs the stairs to a hospital roof trailing a 30-foot drape of sheer, flowing white fabric. Where did she get it? Why is she toting it? Why is it suddenly a lot shorter when she gets there? There's no reasonable explanation, but if you guessed that you'll see it floating gently and photogenically through the air later on, you'd be right. One character accidentally killed his brother in childhood, and another saw her dad accidentally killed in childhood; this kind of material is strong and must be used sparingly, because doubling it like this destroys its power.

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