Guest Writer Julian Suhr: "Up" Review

Well this is kind of cool, writing over here. Established readership is nice, as well as a sense of legitimacy that comes from actually writing for somebody else's blog! Oh goodness this is exciting. And actually kind of weird, because I am in fact writing this on my own blog (because it felt unnatural to write a blog post in Word) before sending it over. So this is preemptive excitement I'm experiencing and deciding to share with readers who might not have a tolerance for oddly self-indulgent introductions dealing with the process of
writing the introduction. Cool stuff. Well, if you managed to deal with that we'll get along fine during the rest of the review. Which is what I'll be getting to in good time, like right now.

So anyways, our movie for today is "Up," without a doubt the touching-est Pixar movie to date. The premise seems more geared towards unlikely comedy of the sort that Pixar manages to pull off miraculously (silent robot love story anyone?) and that leaves all my friends slightly skeptical. A crotchety old dude by the name of Carl, dissatisfied with his elderly lifestyle, decides to literally uproot and flies his house to South America
via lots and lots of balloons to keep an old promise. But a young boy scout type stows away, and the resulting dynamic of young vs. old and grumpy vs. energetic will ensure hilarity on all of their adventures. Right? Kind of. What the premise and trailers fail to mention the reason Carl is a crotchety old dude: his loving wife is dead. She was a woman of spunk and spirit, full of life and big ideas (as the opening montage shows). Their relationship grew from a shared passion for adventures that never materialized, and with her dead Carl is left to confront missed opportunities of youth, the frustrations of elderly life in a changing world, the reality of mortality, and pretty much capital-L Loss and despair. Pixar handles these themes very gently if not exactly subtly; that opening montage sums up all the joys of new love, the excitement of growing up and living life, the slow disillusionment of growing old and realizing that one still works as a balloon salesman at the zoo, the realization that your dream in life is not only unfulfilled but swiftly becoming unattainable, and then a profoundly touching sadness as Carl becomes a widower. It's enough to make even a cynical bastard like myself get a bit dusty. The decision to fly the house away isn't all fun and games either, as Carl's house stands in the way of a gigantic development project and is threatened with what is effectively nursing home arrest. So we've got more going on than a crotchety old dude on an adventure. Carl is doing this as one last hurrah, a decision to finally go and have his life adventure when everything else seems bleak, and as a way of dealing with grief and moving on.

Carl isn't the only one with problems either: the boy scout type, a kid named Russell, is along for the ride to get a merit badge (helping the elderly! Funny!) so that his father will actually pay attention to him at the awards ceremony (child abandonment! Not so funny). And there are even more subthemes, like the disenchantment of meeting a childhood hero and a wildlife conservation message, but what's at the core of the movie is the way Carl comes to terms with his loss (put in the Strangeloveian sense, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love What I've Got Now In Life). But the movie doesn't suffer for all these additional themes. One of the perils of writing reviews long after a movie comes out is that I get exposed to other critic's opinions (because I love reading movie reviews), and then have to try and ignore them or make them my own while I write the review. In this case, I feel the need to address the criticism that "Up" tries to go in too many directions. I respect you Joe Morgenstern, but this is simply not the case. "Up" is a movie of enhanced whimsy, as evidenced by the balloon-elevated house and talking dogs and gigantic bird, so it can't be as tightly wound as a Hong Kong thriller or "Chinatown." All these different thought and ideas get enough deliberation during the film (or deliberation proportional to the significance and importance of the idea), and the movie is richer for them. There's kind of a dreamlike quality to the way that everything kind of floats together, and I was satisfied with the way everything was addressed in the end.

But this defense of themes brings us closer to one of my favorite Pixar topics, namely that they use really grown-up concepts and ideas for a kid's movie. Case in point, go watch "The Incredibles" again and tell me that the Nietzschean overtones are age appropriate, never mind the violent deaths and torture. Blatantly not a kid's movie. The same went for "Wall-E" (apocalypse? Environmental ruin?), although admittedly not as seriously as in "The Incredibles," and it goes again for "Up". Kids simply won't understand grief and loss on this scale. This is a movie about the desperation that sets in when life is near its end and you've lost all you've cared about. Little kids simply won't get it, and if they do understand then they'll be exposed to something so way beyond their ken that it'll be scary. The movie is stronger for these adult considerations, speaking as an adult viewer, but it leaves me to question Pixar's target audience, yet admire their big brass balls. Who else could do a kid's movie about a grieving widower?

And who else could make it so damn funny? We've covered the deeper aspects of "Up," so let's get down to what redeems it from being an animated drama of heart-wrenching proportions. The humor is wonderful- a bit darker in some cases (Carl at one point imagines dropping Russell out of the house), but with impeccable timing and great warmth. Much of this owes to Pixar's great understanding of human interactions, like when Carl's wife (age five) climbs in his window, chats his ears off, and then, on leaving, says, "You don't talk much, do you? I like you," which out of context seems kind of boring but in context, with her spritely line-reading and timing, is absolutely charming. And they know dogs as well as humans- the talking dogs are wonderful while they're not being sinister, especially the doggiest dog of them all, Dug, the only non-Rottweiler, Doberman or Bulldog around. There's a squirrel fixation, tennis ball fixation, and a great bit with the "cone of shame." I'm swiftly realizing that dissecting humor isn't funny, so I'll also mention that the part with the giant bird had me crying with laughter, and move on. I suppose the final thing to say goes without saying, this being Pixar: the voice acting, animation and music are all top-notch and wonderful. This is destined to be a great movie, possibly better than "Wall-E," (although technically very different) and definitely as good as
"the Incredibles."

So that's a guest post. Hope all you new reader types enjoyed. I'm not sure whether or not I'm sorry to have started on such an upbeat and good movie; reading praise is pretty good, but more often reading a review of a terrible movie is even more fun. And there wasn't even anything absurd to harp on in "Up." Ah well, such is life. And I find myself stuck without a good closing word, so I'll do the text equivalent of slinking slowly out of the room by ending with an awkwardly long sentence, such as this.


Julian Suhr writes the movie review blog Never Mind The Bats, which has been on our blogroll forever, and which you should read religiously if you don't already. When he's not reviewing movies, he's probably DJing, playing the sax, or listening to funk.