If you've been living under a rock and haven't had your fill of interconnected multi-character narratives based around coincidences, then by all means consider The Air I Breathe, Jieho Lee's uneven feature debut, which structures its four-part tale around a Chinese proverb that breaks life into four emotional components: happiness, pleasure, sorrow and love. (Sigh. Really, does it even matter at this point?) Lee's film isn't as pandering as Crash, but it isn't about to give Pulp Fiction or La Ronde a run for its money any time soon either.
It starts promisingly enough with Forrest Whitaker as a flustered accountant who's been on the straight and narrow all his life, and who suddenly decides to risk a ton of money on a surefire winner in a horse race. Things don't pan out, and soon he has crazy loan-shark mobster Andy Garcia after him. But that setup fizzles, and we're on to the next story, about Brendan Fraser as a thug with a gift for prophecy (no, really) working for the aforementioned mobster. He has to take care of his boss's petulant nephew (Emile Hirsch) for a night. Something unexpected happens, and Fraser has a revelation of a different sort; as a result, he falls for pop superstar Sorrow (Sarah Michelle Gellar), whose career Garcia is hoping to control.
Lee has style, but you wish he had a sense of humor. The problem with The Air I Breathe isn't its ludicrous story or distractingly star-laden cast, but its stultifying self-importance. Pound for pound, this is not a bad film, but as the coincidences pile on and the manufactured stories and stock characters bounce furiously against one another, the film never cracks a smile. What makes Whitaker's storyline the most interesting is his ability to evoke pathos and comedy at the same time; he can poke fun at himself without betraying the illusion he's trying to create. That subtle ability to alter the pitch of a performance seems to have evaded the rest of the cast, and certainly the director. — Bilge Ebiri
