The quality of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s post-“Buffy” work is debatable, but she at least chose interesting looking projects. “The Air I Breathe” (2007) in fact attracted a remarkably stellar cast for a film no one has heard of.
Story has potential
It’s perhaps because the screenplay reads well. Coming out after Best Picture winner “Crash” (2004) popularized collective-consciousness narratives, this film by director/cowriter Jieho Lee (whose IMDb credits stop after this) is intriguingly structured. In a large generic city, one person’s story overlaps with another’s. Then we follow that next person, and so on.
But “The Air I Breathe” lacks the oxygen of filmmaking, such as a transporting score or cinematography. I was always aware the budget was low (outside of the cast). A press packet on pop star Trina (Gellar) includes a Movieline still that jumped out at me because I have a collection of “Buffy”-themed magazines.
“The Air I Breathe” (2007)
Director: Jieho Lee
Writers: Jieho Lee, Bob DeRosa
Stars: Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Andy Garcia
When I saw on IMDb that the film was shot in Mexico City, I was even more disappointed about the lack of a sense of place.
Every character fits their initial description and never colors outside the lines. The actors are all fine but not transcendent. Andy Garcia is a mob boss; Brendan Fraser is Garcia’s hitman who doesn’t like his job; Forest Whitaker is essentially the depressed man from Collective Soul’s “The World I Know” video; Kevin Bacon is a doctor desperate to save the woman he loves; and Julie Delpy is, well, the woman he loves.
Lee tries to avoid cliches. For example, the character who represents “happiness” is shot dead at the end of the arc. But this person goes out happy. On paper, this is bittersweet stuff. On film, it doesn’t translate. We see what “The Air I Breathe” tries to do … but never quite achieves.
Success without freedom
Gellar’s arc is worth an eyebrow-raise in light of what has come to light about Britney Spears’ career. Trina is a successful arena-touring act, but she’s under the thumb of the mob. Her needs are provided for so long as the money comes in, but she has no freedom.
Overall, though, “The Air I Breathe” is tame. Garcia’s character is called Fingers because he cuts off the fingers of people who don’t pay their betting losses, but his danger is oddly muted. He’s not a presence except when he’s present. An intimate scene between Gellar and Fraser is obligatory – not fake, but not sexy. Just there.
When Bacon enters the picture, he’s an appealing nice-guy doctor who keeps the film moving to its end point. Everything ties together, but my impression is that it’s rote and scripted. The movie says life – although there might be a perverse puppet master behind it — is unpredictable when you’re on the ground living it. It’s so flat in tone, though, that it makes the unpredictable predictable.
Because of the weirdly strong cast and a narrative that almost grabs us, it’s not terribly difficult to sit through “The Air I Breathe.” But for a film to transcend mediocrity, it needs to breathe more than this.