Gwyneth Paltrow’s new movie, View from the Top, is about being an air hostess. Or, rather, it’s about how that profession, in particular the privilege of working the first-class flight to Paris, becomes the raison d’être of a young woman from a small town somewhere in the United States. You know she’s from a small town because she’s all tarted up with a 1970s look. The movie is not set in the 1970s, as far as one can tell, but 1970s style, or some trashy version of it, seems at the moment to be Hollywood code for “small town”. When the Paltrow character moves up in the world she definitely begins to look more 1990s.
As with many mainstream movies stealing a bit of style from the independents (but no substance), View from the Top is going as quirky, with a light, slightly absurdist tone, and a look to match. For some of its running time, one is allowed to imagine that it is sending up the whole notion of professional ambition and competition, and/or making some kind of feminist point about career versus romance. But ultimately View from the Top resolves itself in the most clichéd and boring way. Its offbeat quality is just a stylist’s veneer. This is the kind of movie that seems to have an edge, and then, about a third of the way from the end, it goes blunt.
Paltrow is vaguely charming, if you can stand the cutesy little-girl act, and Mike Myers is amusing, if you find ugliness and physical disability amusing. Candice Bergen, in a small role, is the only part of View from the Top that is really worth seeing. In her scenes, she more-or-less wipes Paltrow off the screen.
Luckily, opening at the same time as View from the Top is Secretary, which acts as something of a corrective to its fake quirkiness. In Secretary, the blonde ambition represented by Paltrow is replaced by a brunette’s sexual darkness.
Secretary is truly odd, both in conception and in its thematic concerns: it’s about how necessary it is for individuals to accept — to “own”, in Oprah-speak — their oddities. In this case, a young woman (Maggie Gyllenhaal) has to learn to own her masochistic desires. She is socially dysfunctional until she is able to do this, which she accomplishes with the ambivalent assistance of James Spader, still playing his specialist creepy-sexy role. He is her lawyer boss, who leads her in the paths of wickedness — self-realising wickedness, that is. Gyllenhaal gives a tremendous performance, all dithering intensity.
Secretary has a similar absurdist tone to View from the Top — the air of a strange fairy tale or fable. It is less aggressively styled and stylised than View from the Top (in part, no doubt, because it is not so much low-budget as budgetless), but that gives it more room to breathe, and the fable-like quality works because it taps into something deeper, which View from the Top can’t because it’s no deeper than Paltrow’s make-up. Secretary is genuinely, though sometimes blackly, funny in a way View from the Top isn’t because it is relying on the conventions of TV sitcom humour. In terms of story trajectory, Secretary differs from View from the Top in that it has no concern with social ambition or career progress.
Well, there is the progress of the Gyllenhaal character’s being able to work and function at all. But she doesn’t escape from her small-town suburbia, just from the suburbanisation of her mind and her body.
Secretary is a good, quietly bizarre little film, one which (again, unlike View from the Top, and so many other hollow Hollywood products) has the courage of its convictions, so it feels unkind to carp. But it does seem overstretched, probably because it doesn’t have much more to say than that one should acknowledge and accept one’s personal perversities. Quite what one does with that knowledge, especially if there is no one to answer such needs, it doesn’t say. The Piano Teacher it is not. It’s more of a short story than a novel.
Yet Secretary is, at any rate, much less irksome than the prospect of Paltrow achieving her dream. It maintains its edge.