For all its philosophical aspirations, there’s a pretentiousness to the “we’re all connected” motif that the makers of “The Air I Breathe” seem all but oblivious to.

Most movies of this sort, whether Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,” or Paul Haggis’s “Crash,” offset the preposterousness of their overlapping dramas with an array of realistic, empathetic characters. Sure, the frogs-falling-from-the-heavens conceit of “Magnolia” led more than a few audiences to roll their eyes but, by the time the Hand of God swept in to save the day, we had already been given such a rich ensemble of broken hearts that our concern for them helped us to look past the arbitrary deus ex machina that decided their fates. In “The Air I Breathe,” not only does the air seem the stuff of Hollywood convention, so do those breathing it. From the outset, the theme of interconnectedness puts the story on shaky ground. There’s the up-and-coming pop star who suddenly finds her career placed in the hands of a tyrannical loan shark. Then there’s the loan shark’s right-hand man and his telepathic muscle, who inadvertently affects the life of a woman in a hospital. The woman, who is suffering from a poisonous snakebite, is also the doctor’s lifelong secret love.

It’s a bewildering process of connect-the-dots, made even more difficult to engage — much less care about — by yet a second layer of high-concept coincidences. In basing the movie on an ancient Chinese proverb, which breaks life down into four essential pillars — happiness, pleasure, sorrow, and love — first-time director Jieho Lee chops up the narrative to fit his themes, giving us four distinct characters named after these pillars that exist more as metaphors than human beings.

Yet even here, within these separate stories, there’s a sense of a filmmaker jerking around our expectations. Our hero of “happiness” (played by Forest Whitaker), for example, is not the least bit happy; our “pleasure” man seems to reap no joy from life. And while the end of each chapter reaffirms why these characters have been given these names, there’s a sense of “gotcha!” filmmaking at work here — that every story will take the long and murky way around in hopes of throwing the audience off the scent. This isn’t sophisticated or smart filmmaking; it’s dishonest.

Unwisely, the movie opens with the most affecting of its four chapters, leaving the remainder to stand as something of a letdown. Happiness is a stockbroker trapped in the dull routine of his cubicle-bound existence who thinks he has stumbled onto a gambling windfall but instead stumbles into a thug named Fingers (Andy Garcia) and his main goon, Pleasure (Brendan Fraser). The second chapter details Pleasure’s supernatural gift for seeing the future. His bleak story shifts gears when he meets Sorrow (Sarah Michelle Gellar), an up-and-coming music star — and the one person whose future he cannot see.

All of which leads to Kevin Bacon — yes, you could accurately dub the movie “Four Degrees of Kevin Bacon” — as the character of Love, a doctor who has never had the chance to express his true feelings to the love of his life, and who rushes to save her life by crossing paths with Sorrow.

It’s a pity that none of these characters feels human, because there’s an array of genuine performances crying out for a more genuine script. In racing to imitate the epic formula that wowed Oscar voters with “Crash,” Mr. Lee and his co-writer, Bob DeRosa, neglected to consider whether their story required such a convoluted approach to begin with.

ssnyder@nysun.com