Film Review With Adult Beverage: UP & Primal Scream

Carl and Russel getting their lives back.I admit I cried during the first fifteen minutes of Pete Docter's animated film Up.  You have to, it's the law.

I get that everybody likes it. No problem there.  It's a worthy entry into the Disney / Pixar canon of films that deserve to hang around.

And not all of Disney's films do.  I'm planning a blog post on Disney and its defective imagination and why it's a moral issue.  Yes, I do globalize my feelings, what's your point?

But for me, the movie crashed like a house dropped from a six hundred foot cliff after that, managing a few laughs but never quite living up to the frank sentimentality of its opening.  I think all the tones it aims at are good.  They just don't mix well.

The trajectory or arc or whatever we're calling it these days manages to make one fatal error: it doesn't really redeem a loss, it erases it.

Subtle difference.

Let me sum up. 

No, it's too complicated.  Let me 'splain.

Up is a fun movie all the way through. 

But it makes a promise right at the beginning: We're going to tell you the truth about dying, and pain, and loss.  We're not going to whitewash this for you.  You're going to feel this.

It doesn't quite keep that promise, in my view.

Up begins with an absolutely charming and heartwarming mostly-silent film about true love and how it gets in the bones, and it executes it almost flawlessly, relying on understatement and on the lesson that Disney never learned until it acquired Pixar: kids are smart enough to get it, mostly.

I remember watching this opening segment in which Carl Frederickson meets, loves, marries, and loses Ellie.  It's a happiness rooted in childhood's strongest moment, the one where we're hunting for ourselves and finding it in the mirror of others.  There's not too much to say about it, and the filmmakers wisely don't say much.   The Fredericksons dream dreams together, and tangle their spirits up inextricably in their dreams.  Disappointments (they lose a child, Ellie becomes ill as she ages) are presented with their I.V. tubes and funeral wreathes and in tasteful understatement.

The music does what film-music ought to do, which is to strengthen what we would be feeling if it weren't there.

And there's plenty of feeling.

Ellie's death leaves Carl lonely, and from that moment on we know it's just a matter of an hour and a half or so before he gets his new lease on life.

The mechanism is inventive: he decides to fulfill Ellie's childhood fantasy of planting her "clubhouse" (now Carl's home) atop a remote cliff in South America.  Using helium balloons.

This is a refreshing take on dementia.  We see its logic.  We see how it is a function of isolation as much as it is anything else, a way of talking to those who understand us who just happen not to be there, and a slow creation of a private sanity that separates us from those who must think we are mad.

Carl is of course joined on his journey by someone who needs him, a neglected kid named Russel.

Some clever slapstick animation and witty dialogue keep the film charming, but what's interesting is that the understatement that worked so well in the opening few minutes leaves us grasping for a motive as Carl takes on the burden of caring for Russel.

Ellie's ghost hangs around the house, and Carl, thinking he has achieved the move of the house for her, comes to realize he has done it for himself.  So he turns outward again.Get Off My Lawn.

It's an old theme, and doubtless true.

But something doesn't sit right here.  While I think it's right that Carl should learn to live again, and to see his life with Ellie as a process of love that never dies rather than an achievement he has now accomplished, the Carl who loved Ellie is not so much transformed by that love as erased.  Now he has a new life. 

Maybe that's the way these things go.

Maybe we gain amnesia as well as dementia.

I hope not.

If I want to love, I remember.

If I want to forget, I drink straight scotch whiskey.

If I want to feel like my house is floating away, I drink a Primal Scream.  It's easy to mix, which is a big bonus when you're drinking so you feel like your house is floating away.

In a glass, pour a half shot of Kahlua and a half shot of tequila. 

Add a splash of soda.

Place your hand over the top of the glass, bang the table to mix it, reciting a prayer to the god of designated drivers, and slam it down.

Repeat as necessary.

Comments

[anonymous]

The amnesia you speak of is life going on. We want the earth to swallow us whole, but the kids need to get to soccer practice, teeth need to be brushed, bills need to be paid. Have you ever read "Penelope" by Dorothy Parker? Epic moments and epiphanies are a fraction of life. They may peek around the corners of every other moment and haunt us, but I think the film got it right. Life does go on as much as we feel at times it is somehow disloyal.

[Otter]

I agree. But I don't have to like it.

I missed Ellie the whole second half of the film and well into the credits.

[anonymous]

I didn't say I liked missing people. I just said life goes on and not always in the tragic key we think appropriate.

[Otter]

Yeah, and I think you're right, really.

I'm just sort of contrarian. Some people like happy endings. I like authentic misery.

So your point's well taken: I think I'm really just complaining because I wanted to feel more misery before the redemption.

For what it's worth, I think it's a worthy film.

It just made me feel a little empty.