The new Gwyneth Paltrow comedy View from the Top (directed by Bruno Barreto, written by Eric Wald) is a sad, paradoxical example of Hollywood ineptitude undermining intentional camp. When a serious movie was inept it was often funny despite itself; when intentional camp is inept it's pathetic. I don't just mean it's lame--it goes soft, tries to jerk tears. View from the Top is like a number of recent failed campy comedies with female stars--it starts out getting laughs either from showing a heroine who is driven by a tacky ambition (here Paltrow's dream is to be a stewardess on an international route; in To Die For (1995) Nicole Kidman wanted to be a TV weathergirl) or from showing a girl out of her natural context (Reese Witherspoon as a ditzy sorority girl at Harvard Law School in Legally Blonde (2001); Sandra Bullock as a tomchick FBI agent going undercover as a beauty contestant in Miss Congeniality (2000)), but by the end takes her ambitions or relationship to that context and her emotional life seriously. These movies start out seeming as if they were made for a gay male audience and end up seeming as if they were made for teenaged girls. (To Die For is a bit more complex in that it takes its editorializing about the media seriously as melodrama, but still starts bent and ends straight.) Even a mostly terrific example like Romy and Michele's High School Reunion (1997) takes the bitchiness of the high school A-list girls too seriously, but it manages to keep you laughing. The disadvantage is that when intentional camp fails you don't laugh. It's weirdly dispiriting because you've been led on by the moviemakers' deceptively hip signals.

Gwyneth Paltrow dresses tacky but unlike Mira Sorvino she won't really go undercover in the role of the Nevada babe who dreams of offering gamblers and drunks the best service in the sky. In Romy and Michele, and before that in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Sorvino adapted her voice and body language to the outlines of the caricature. Sorvino doesn't do sketch acting like Mike Myers does as Wayne or Austin Powers, exactly. Her performances have more body than that without abandoning the realm of camp. She approaches camp like an artist, yet without self-seriousness. Paltrow has one good scene early on--her first day on the job is also her first flight--but generally holds back from the artificiality, saving herself for the teary serious scenes, which of course can't really mean anything to us because they've been undermined by the campy establishing scenes.