The job of your dreams

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post

Gwyneth Paltrow plays a small-town girl with lofty ambitions, or at least ambitions of being aloft, in the new comedy "View From the Top," a rare film about the American workplace. Miramax via Gannett News Service

It's meant to be cute. Maybe it is, but I hate cute. However, the movie does have one thing going for it that should be noted and appreciated.

It is one of the rare American workplace films, and as such it's a decent if not overly rigorous examination of that zone where most of us spend our time, where our dreams are crushed, our hopes pulverized, our disappointments amplified and our lives ruined. You know: the office.

It happens that Donna Jensen's office is 35,000 feet up, on the route from New York to Paris, which isn't bad work if you can get it. But that's the problem: She almost doesn't.

At heart, "View From the Top" is a how-to guide for office success. It demonstrates how Donna (Paltrow) makes it to her goal, and what conspired to keep her from it and the hard choices she had to make on the way. Though candy-colored, it's not without some wisdom.

Its best tip: Get a mentor. Take it from somebody who never had one: This always works. It's your best insurance against clique warfare, against the brute whimsy of institutions, against old-boy or old-girl networks, against supervisors who are nitwits, half-wits or no-wits.

The movie demonstrates how Donna, her hard work stolen from her by a meretricious second-rater, at last turns to Sally Weston (Candice Bergen), a legendary flight attendant/self-help author (she invented the double-handed, double-fingered exit location technique, so we are clearly talking greatness), to go outside channels and right a certain workplace injustice.

It works here; it'll probably work in your office. If you don't have a mentor, then you'd best have a lot of what "View From the Top" sees as the No. 2 ingredient for success: talent.

And the truth of the film is that Donna has talent. She can't write a novel or sing an aria or hit a major-league curve ball, but she can make 30 people comfortable and serenely confident at 600 mph.

And she can do it when she's dead tired or scared to death or shattered over a breakup with a boyfriend or after a fistfight with that second-rater.

That can't be easy, and give it to this mild little film, it respects professionalism wherever it finds it, even in first class.

And, admirably in my view, it boasts a straight-on willingness to take dead seriously a job regarded universally as trivial.

The flight attendant: Isn't she the one who throws you the six-month-old pack of artificial peanuts and Corn Chex and pours you a third of a can of Diet Coke? Well, no, the film argues, she's a lot more: She's worked like hell to get there and it's not the easiest job in the world, and you'd darn well better respect her.

The movie sees this work and, by extension, any work as an ennobling quest, not a degrading exploitation. A young woman from a small, drab town and a dysfunctional family gives herself to a career. She will work hard, master arcane skills, learn the secret of the eternal smile and the knee-bend service posture. In return, the company will take her places, show her things, make her belong. If only it worked out so neatly.

Of course it doesn't always work out neatly. In companies, people get sandbagged, cheated, sidetracked, bushwhacked and left for dead. It sometimes doesn't matter how great you are if within the company culture you are not viewed as serious or if an early impression proves impossible to change.

The first and most interesting drama of Donna's career starts when she's inexplicably dumped into a commuter run in Cleveland, not the national flights out of New York which are a steppingstone to her dreams. What does she do? She figures it out and makes it better.

The movie says: Don't just take it, workers of the world. Go for it! Fight! Scheme! Win!

And the movie also answers a question most movies ignore: What do you do when you finally get the dream job you've wanted all your life?

Well, says "View From the Top," you shut up and go to work.