Air I Breathe, The

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The more I think about it, the more "The Air I Breathe" is the marriage of Oscar-winner "Crash" and the radio program "This American Life." From the former, we take individual stories and use each of the four main characters to impact someone else. They don´t know each other, generally speaking, while one through line connects them all: Andy Garcia´s Fingers. "This American Life" comes into play since each vignette is a meditation on a theme, a story we normally wouldn´t associate with that theme. For instance, we would generally think of Happiness as being in love, wealthy or healthy. Not so for the Forest Whitaker character. He wants out of his day to day monotony whatever the cost.

Then there´s Pleasure, brilliantly played by Brendan Fraser. His ideal, similar to Happiness, isn´t independent wealth or status. It´s simply to not know what is coming next. While Sorrow´s (Sarah Michelle Gellar) story of a pop diva focuses on the a standard theme, it is Kevin Bacon´s Love who shows just how far a man can go for the emotion.

Co-writers Jieho Lee and Bob DeRosa (Lee also directed) craft a personal narrative, interweaving each character into another vignette. That is the brilliance of "The Air I Breathe": it makes the audience pay attention to timelines, dialogue and background details in order to form the complete picture. To have Lee tell it in the commentary track, Pleasure, Happiness, Love and Sorrow are interconnected emotions, for to know one of them, you must know all of them. They make up the very essence of human beings. From them, all other emotions spring.

With the talent in front of the camera and a director intent on a vision behind it, this film manages to never overstay its welcome, opting instead to leave us wanting more at the end. Each character in their own way is such a magnetic personality we can´t help but be drawn to them from the very first shot of their story. By design, the vignette´s begin with a glimpse at the finale, the idea of working to bring the ending back to the beginning in some way. In some respects, this technique could be construed as spoiling the climax, but I disagree. It is more about giving the audience a reason to pay attention, to show these people at-arguably-their worst and exploring how they got there. And just because the flashforwards appear to show the ending does not mean there isn´t anywhere for the film to take us afterward. No story ends on the opening shot, so to speak.

Because this is an intensely narrative film, to talk about one vignette would mean spoiling all of them. Instead, we´ll talk generalities common to the film as a whole. As mentioned previously, the linchpin through the production is Fingers, a pseudo-gangster running a seedy casino/betting house. It is Garcia´s performance, thoroughly evil yet devilishly upstanding, which gives the film a central villain, someone to root against instead of for. There is always an underlying fear the man could snap at any time…or snap moreso than he already has. Running the gamut from sadistic terrorizer to sympathetic uncle, other characters never know which Fingers is going to emerge, prompting the same fear in the audience and giving him unbridled power.

The revelation here is Fraser, who gives his best performance since "Gods and Monsters." With his expressive eyes and near-defeated demeanor, Pleasure turns into the most sympathetic of the main characters. Despite being the money guy for Fingers and the violence necessary in his line of work, there´s never the feeling he truly enjoys roughing anyone up. And as Fraser lets down the gruff exterior, he´s able to portray-again, with relatively few words-a soul looking for something to turn his life around. Or, to be more exact, a way to find ultimate pleasure.

Lee shoots the film in almost exclusive close ups, not allowing us to get a view of the world surrounding any of these characters. It is true there are long shots and background extras nearly all the time, but there is no wider world view to take into account. These people are going through personal turmoil; when that happens in real life, we tend to block out everything else, focusing in on our specific problem. Because of the subject matter and shooting style, "The Air I Breathe" almost feels claustrophobic, as if we can´t get away from the problems either. The style works for the narrative simply because it adds to the underlying meaning Lee and DeRosa are conveying.

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