VIEW FROM THE TOP (2003). A downtrodden but plucky Nevadan (Gwyneth Paltrow) escapes small-town anomie to find glory as a flight attendant in Bruno Barreto's brief and brightly colored, if not very funny, pop confection. In its eerie blend of irony and sentimentality, the film feels like an accurate re-creation of a mental juggling act that must be familiar to many Americans: holding the tackiness and the false promises of official culture in affectionate contempt while believing in the eventual vindication of true love, hard work, and honesty. Fusing these two positions in queasy splendor, the film at the last moment takes two figures whom it has ridiculed throughout (Mike Myers's nerdy trainer and Candice Bergen's parvenu socialite) and turns them into poster children for middle-class solidarity. But its insouciance is so all-embracing that pointing out unacknowledged contradictions seems petty, especially since for most of the film, the only possible interest lies in seeing Paltrow and co-star Christina Applegate squeezed into the various outfits that mark their characters' progress. (88m)

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