Please fasten seat belts; ‘View’ is a bumpy ride

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. As in so many Hollywood movies set in that vast stretch of nothing between the coasts, life seems terribly bleak in Silver Springs, Nev., where Donna sells rollaway suitcases without ever having stepped inside a plane. After her boyfriend dumps her, though, she dries her tears with pages from a motivational book by a power stewardess (Candice Bergen) and before long she’s up, up and away, following her destiny, while the movie is down, down and away, plumbing its degradation.

Written by newcomer Eric Wald and directed by Bruno Barreto, “View From the Top” is worth commenting on only for its shocking ineptitude. Narrated in an intermittent drone by Paltrow, the story follows Donna’s route from Silver Springs to flight-attendant school with an extended layover in Cleveland, where she’s romanced by a law student (Mark Ruffalo). Characters enter and exit about as often as planes take off and land, and with as much narrative tension.

Barreto, who directed the well-received “Four Days in September,” isn’t a natural comic talent, but his work usually evidences a level of solid craftsmanship absent here. 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.

Of course, the plane crash jokes don’t help. The film was shot in late 2000, granted, but not even a cameo from “Airplane” veteran George Kennedy makes the gags any less gagging. It isn’t just that the jokes are largely unfunny; it’s that the filmmakers can’t decide if they’re after big belly laughs or champagne nose tickles. In one scene after another, Mike Myers, as a goggle-eyed flight instructor, attempts to fill the dead air with tedious slap-shtick while Paltrow struggles to steer her character toward the fizzy sophistication of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” There’s something undeniably watchable in the sight of these two working at unintended cross-purposes, adrift in very different comedies, but since the movie is only a minor disaster rather than an epic catastrophe, even the negative entertainment value is finally disappointing.

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. She gave a touching, delicate performance in the film she made afterward, Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” in which she was lovingly directed and photographed. Barreto’s cinematographer, Affonso Beato, has done well by Pedro Almodovar on several occasions, but “View From the Top” couldn’t look uglier and its star couldn’t look worse. (The lighting doesn’t match scene to scene, sometimes shot to shot.) If nothing else it’s a measure of the filmmakers’ disregard for, even hostility toward, their star that Paltrow’s legs, around which the camera continually and expectantly hovers, are always far better lighted than her face.

*

‘View From the Top’

MPAA rating: PG-13, for language/sexual references.

Times guidelines: Some mild adult humor a la a 1960s Playboy jokes page.

Gwyneth Paltrow...Donna Jensen

Mark Ruffalo...Ted

Candice Bergen...Sally Weston

Kelly Preston...Sherry

Mike Myers...John Whitney

A Brad Grey Pictures/Cohen Pictures production, released by Miramax Films. Director Bruno Barreto. Writer Eric Wald. Producers Brad Grey, Matthew Baer, Bobby Cohen. Director of photography Affonso Beato. Production designer Dan Davis. Editor Christopher Greenbury, Ray Hubley. Music Theodore Shapiro. Costume designer Mary Zophres. Casting Marci Liroff. Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes.

In general release.