Text size:

'The Air I Breathe'

Rating:

BY GENE SEYMOUR | gene.seymour@newsday.com

January 25, 2008

With any luck, "The Air I Breathe" should be the last gasp of the faux-Altmanesque school of serendipitous storytelling. The whole subgenre of we're-all-connected narrative strands has, with few exceptions, proven that Robert Altman was the only filmmaker with the intuitive agility to pull off such storytelling. And yet, young filmmakers such as Jieho Lee - whatever else they may bring to the table - remain convinced that they'll trip over profundity and insight if they yoke together enough random encounters.

For instance: Have you ever wondered if a butterfly knows how beautiful it is when it emerges from a cocoon? Me neither, but that's what's on the feeble mind of a clerk named Happiness (Forest Whitaker), whose face-to-face encounter with a butterfly convinces him to make an ill-advised bet on a race horse that doesn't pay off. This puts him in hot water with a mobster named Fingers (Andy Garcia), who keeps insisting he's basically a good man even though he insists on doing bodily harm to those who cross him.

Meanwhile, Fingers' ablest henchman, whose name is Pleasure (Brendan Fraser), finds his ability to glimpse the future hampered by his affection for a troubled pop star named Sorrow (Sarah Michelle Gellar), who's been sold out to Fingers and is trying to break free. Meanwhile, a doctor named (you guessed it) Love (Kevin Bacon) needs the pop star's blood to save the life of his unrequited love (Julie Delpy).

Happiness, Sorrow, Pleasure, Love ... They do have other names, but it's what they embody that's more important than who they are. Get the picture, folks? This is a movie that thinks that if you proclaim Big Ideas loudly enough, you're a sage. Lee is no sage, though at times he shows himself to be a real filmmaker, even if he relies too much on bodies slamming into windshields. If he can tone down the pretense and keep things simpler, Lee may actually find the enlightenment he's straining to show here.

THE AIR I BREATHE (R). And it's pretty stuffy in here, if you ask us, despite a top-notch cast that includes Forest Whitaker, Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Kevin Bacon, Julie Delpy and Andy Garcia as somebody named "Fingers." They're all connected in ways that are too contrived and pretentious to get into here. Directed by Jieho Lee. 1:37 (violence, language, sexual content, nudity). At AMC Empire 25, Manhattan.