ลุงบุญมีระลึกชาติ (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) *

It's frustrating to watch a film that's basically all symbolism and recognize that you're only getting about 20% of the symbols, but that's how it felt for me as I watched this. Totally dreamlike, a sad fantasy world based on a very eastern approach to mythology and philosophy, and full of historical, cultural, political references that I have only the slightest ideas about. Still, as Jen points out, it's a testament to how fundamentally good a movie is when you still get and enjoy it on a core level despite all the missed layers and references.

The same "monkey spirits" in this -- or similar enough for me, an outsider -- appear as vaguely hostile forces in Princess Mononoke: dark, shaggy shapes lacking distinction or detail, with impossibly glowing red eyes. But seeing them here, in live action, was so much more beautiful and surreal than seeing animated creatures. The moments between Boonmee and his wife, Huay, were consistently touching in how underplayed and vulnerable they were, and the general tone of casual, deadpan acceptance of the bizarre and the impossible lends a soft dignity to some of the stranger moments that I don't think a western film could pull off. The cave, the letting of his fluids, the talk between dying husband and dead wife about how and where they will meet in the afterlife, the monk and Aunt Jen becoming literally detached from their own bodies and going to get dinner in a karaoke bar while they also stayed behind to watch boring television -- all of it was beautiful and wonderful and rich. Not to mention the midstory vignette of the ugly princess and the catfish.

I really liked this film, and the world it shows me, and the mood and atmosphere of the whole thing, and I will definitely watch this again one day, but I still can't help but feel like most of it went over my head. It's too Thai to be meant for me, in a certain sense; but in another, it's perfectly universal and all the more powerful for being so obviously coded about much of its meaning.

Seen at CineMagic, as part of the Portland International Film Festival.

Up

Up is such a hard film to parse for me. I'm reasonably certain it's the most thematically and dramatically complex story Pixar has done yet. It's also the most symbolically rich film I think they've done, and as such I suspect it's the most unpackable Pixar film to date. More than any of the others -- even ones I personally have more fondness for (not that I'm short in the fondness department when it comes to this one) -- Up is a slippery riddle that seems to run off in all directions at once and still manages to feel like a single cohesive story.

Last time I watched this I dismissed it somewhat glibly as one of those stories (like Wall-E, like Juno) that starts in one direction and seems to veer off in another, broader direction once the story gets going, and I don't think that's a wrong assessment. It's just that Up seems like it does that a little differently, a little more aware. On first glance, it seems like the story is Carl's need to fulfill his dead wife's wish, to keep a crossed-heart promise to the young girl he fell so deeply in love with. In fact Carl achieves that, actually, about an hour in, and what's left is the discovery that his wife's final wish was not for him to live in their past but to "have new adventures," to never give up the ghost, and to live in his own present and future. Up isn't about a man trying to float a house down to a South American jungle to make real the silly dreams of his youth; it's about a man coping with loss and finding a way to honor that loss without losing himself as well.

To that end we also have other characters dealing with loss: Russell has lost his father (presumably to divorce); Charles Muntz has lost the respect of the nation, and maybe you could argue he's lost his soul to the bitterness of spending a lifetime hunting for Kevin, the giant bird -- who in turn has lost her family and the way home. There's even Dug, who's never really had a loving master as far as we know in the story. Dug's maybe an outlier, in that he wants the same kinds of things our heroes want (family, father/son relationship and love, dignity and self-respect) but we don't get the sense that these are things he has ever had. Still, for the most part Up feels like a bunch of lost and wounded souls with colliding trajectories. Or that's my passing theory on the subject.

The truth is, this new perspective still figures oddly into the final act, which pits Fredricksen against Muntz. I guess the key to all this is Kevin, the macguffin-in-bird-form, who is trying to get back to her home. Muntz wants to use her to absolve the shame of his career and prove that he was not a fraud and a fake (which, it should be pointed out, he was not, making his villainy almost problematically tragic), and Carl wants to rescue Kevin and deliver her to her babies -- which is actually not Carl's quest at all, but Russell's -- and even that is Russell's secondary quest since we begin the story with Russell's mission definitively set as "assisting the elderly" and helping Carl on Carl's journey -- and even that is just a means to an end, because what Russell is really after is reunion with his lost father (which is similar to how Carl's quest to relocate his house is actually a means to reconnecting with the ghost of his wife).

You can see how it's a puzzle to decode here. Halfway through the story -- when Carl looks through Ellie's Adventure Book and realizes she's lived her full life and only wants her husband to do the same -- Carl completely changes his goals. At this point in the narrative, Russell has already made up his mind, and abandons his main quest (assist Carl, win back his father) and pursues this secondary quest as well. This actually prompts a focus in Carl's objective from saving Kevin to saving Russell. I suppose what happens here is our two heroes learn to look past their own selfish needs and desires and to connect with a larger world, to both be a family unit and to help bring together other family units as well. Coping with loss means acknowledging the pain (and Up doesn't skimp, especially in the first forty minutes, on scenes that hurt) and embracing what follows, the new, the different, the unexpected. It's hard to say if I'm making excuses for a film's convoluted second act or digging into the heart of the matter and finding the true reason for it, but it does feel like a theme here is to find the next adventure and to connect with likeminded souls and to be a family, in the looser-and-so-much-more-meaningful Vonnegutian sense of the word "family."

On a stylistic note, Up walks the finest line of any modern fantasy I know of between gritty realism (the sets and action, the photography, the existence of death and despair and the gravity with which they're treated, the peril throughout, the even the use of mundane-sounding names like "Muntz" and "Russell" and "Carl Fredrickson") and broadly comic cartoonishness (the character design, the balloon-house premise, the simplicity of their mission and ease of getting to South America, the Disney's Alice in Wonderland tone of Kevin, and of course talking dogs who pilot aircraft and fear the cone of shame). Sometimes the story dips too far into one side or the other, and for my money the overly broad strokes are the trouble spots, but for the most part it manages to keep this balance surprisingly well. It's satisfying to watch and it's satisfying to think about.

Up isn't my favorite Pixar film. In some ways, it feels like one of the messiest, structurally. But in other ways, it really does feel like one of the most mature, and the messiness smacks of deliberate intent. (Compare to Wall-E, a film I personally felt had more potential in its simplicity but slipped too far into broadly-painted cartoon elements and never really came back -- the messiness there doesn't feel as deliberate.) Up feels worth closer and closer inspections, because so much is happening on so many layers. I didn't even talk about the visual symbolism -- I could write twice as much on that subject and still not crack the surface.

Pixar is famous for being the undisputed kings of western animation, and without question this is rightly so. But for all of the prettiness of their computer-generated art, character design, photography and effects, their greatest strength has always been in the writing. Nobody writes an animated script like Pixar, with tough-to-explain (let alone sell) premises and layers of meaning and emotional resonance. The screenplays are the golden secret weapon that keeps Pixar ahead of everyone else in the game, and Up is a perfect example.

Up in the Air

The first portion of Up in the Air plays like Fight Club declawed, with a sardonic voiceover using lists of products and concepts to reassure us that our lifestyles based on nihilism and cynicism are thoroughly justified. I know it's based on a novel (and I know the book has a major subplot about Ryan Bingham suffering from cancer, that I can't help but wonder what the movie might have been like with, but in the end I think I like it just fine as-is), and I can't say if the style comes out of the novel or not, but it's hard to imagine this story existing if someone, either Walter Kirn or the screenwriter Sheldon Turner (or maybe Reitman himself, also credited) hadn't seen the Fincher film or read the Palahniuk book. Of course that's just the set-up of the book, and after act one the two tend for the most part to part ways. Where Fight Club goes on to challenge your expectations of anarchy, masculinity, and taking back your agency from a castrative culture, Up in the Air is a challenge to concepts of isolation and casual objectivism and of course, a romantic dramedy about unemployment and getting older, wanting to settle down. Like Juno and Thank You For Smoking, there are themes present but they're pretty unfocused, hitting broad swaths that do not necessarily complement each other, but at least they don't often clash. Reitman, I think, works in thematic subplots more than thematic throughlines. That is to say, sometimes every single scene in a film speaks intelligently to whatever the "theme" or "themes" of a story are, often being about two things at once. Here it feels a little more to me like a sitcom, with an A story, a B story, and a C story, and each plotline has its own intelligent theme and subject matter, but they do not necessarily contribute to each other directly. In Juno this left me feeling like the story was schizophrenic, and began as one thing (a coming-of-age morality tale about a quirky, strong-willed girl and her unexpected pregnancy) and ended as something else (a romcom about picking the right guy and staying with him, dependent on the dull, milquetoast charms of an underplaying Michael Cera in shorty gym shorts). The charm was good but the story felt like two trains colliding. Here the charm is just as good (smarter, wiser, less quirky) and the various plots and themes at least weaved together into more of a single dramatic story.

On a dramatic front, it was fun to look at the characters in this. Anna Kendrick's Natalie kept pushing caricature to the point of breaking, but every time I was on the verge of hating her she'd redeem herself by making interesting choices in performance and character. (An easy example is the moment when she cryingly meets Alex, which is both funny and telling of her character in many ways.) It felt like Natalie had an outer layer of faith in the systems around her (marriage, love, education, her firing-my-videochat system) but that covered an inner core of extreme vulnerability, uncertainty, and doubt bordering on panic. Likewise it felt like Ryan Bingham had an outer layer of cynicism and disdain for those systems, with an inner core of loneliness, regret, and doubt. The inner turmoil and the reversed-polarities of these two made them a nice, if artificial, match-up. (Almost everything about this film feels artificial; you either accept that or you don't.)

The only fault I feel like pointing out here is, on second viewing, it's a lot harder to ever sympathize with Alex, Vera Forgmiga's too-good-to-be-true counterpart for Ryan. As a dark reflection and a worst-case foil for Ryan's emotional and moral states, I get it, but there are a number of times where it becomes clear she's simply living a double life. She may justify it any number of ways, but her no-nonsense strong-woman routine just hides the kind of lying scoundrel men are traditionally considered monsters for being. She's practically the creepy father with a different family in every city he visits. It was good of the movie not to soften that by letting Ryan forgive her entirely (or immediately, anyway; because let's be realistic) but it was odd to breeze over just how bad she was to everyone who loved her in her life. Maybe that's my own personal morals showing through, but for a film about Ryan Bingham's self-examining soul-search to slide right by what felt like a major blow to his self-image -- to have the person you think of as "just like you but with a vagina" revealed as so deceptive (and self-deceptive) seems... well, it feels like in classic films when they'd try to sneak something by the censorship boards, but in reverse. Anyway, something in her character doesn't sit right on second watch, maybe because there aren't enough clues or hints about the nature of her life when the subject comes up, and that paints her as a baldfaced, unabashed liar (worse than a cheater). But for the most part, the film is fun, breezy, but with some dramatic heft and thoughtful stuff going on under the surface. For my money, this is the follow-up I wanted to the very similar Thank You For Smoking. I'll continue considering Juno an aberrant blip on the director's trajectory, until he proves me wrong.

Under the Volcano

This film feels like it's purely about the charisma of staring into the abyss, the magnetism of a downward spiral. Specifically, this film charts a varied and colorful spectrum of alcoholism through a single man so far gone that he -- to paraphrase his own summation -- must drink the right amount to strike a balance between the shakes and oblivion. The way his loved ones, his estranged/returned wife and his half-brother, tolerate his behavior speaks of a different era and philosophy, but it also speaks of a hard-earned understanding, painful though it might be, of what is left of Geoffrey Firmin and how this man survives. His emotional and psychic states are just as stormy and delicately poised as his physical, and the question in Under The Volcano is never "Will he live or die?" but "How long will he last, and what specific indignity will be his undoing?" After all, it's the Day of the Dead, and Geoffrey has been drinking himself to death for a long time now. Now's as good a time as any to let go.

Supposedly the novel -- apparently called one of the best novels of the 20th century, though to be honest I scarcely know of it outside the context of this film -- is full of colorful descriptions of drink-induced hallucinations and surreality, but the film is decidedly literal, grounded, and lacking in flights of fancy. I read a review somewhere that suggested Huston left all the hallucinations inside Geoffrey's head, and allowed Albert Finney to portray them as such. I don't know about all that, but the quality and quantity of madness behind those dark shades and half-confounded fish-face lips is legion. Under the Volcano threatens to collapse under its own weight, but at the same time it is amazing to watch, to take in, to let all that bleak energy wash over you.

Sous le sable (Under the Sand)

It was hard not to compare this film to The Vanishing or even Frantic, only this plays out exactly the opposite: what if your loved one suddenly disappeared one day and you never looked for them, ever?

Since I've been watching understated, observational dramas and thinking about writing, I was really focused on the way we see (or don't see) the choices and actions our protagonist makes. For the most part we only see Marie avoiding confrontation and living with the consequences of her unconscious decisions. The only times we see her step up and make decisions are whenever she gets backed into a corner -- and invariably these are the best, most memorable moments. By skipping over her first initial decision and letting us slowly acclimate to its aftermath, we have a really different experience watching her reinforce that decision later on, with increasingly bolder and more desperate decisions. That is to say, we see her stand by her unconscious choice from the beginning in the face of mounting obstacles and higher stakes.

It gives me something to think about, as the story I'm working on is all based on one crazy decision made by my joint-protagonist couple.

Up

Like Wall-E, it feels flawless for about 40 minutes, and then when our heroes get to the New World, they meet colorful, ridiculous goofy characters, and the story feels hijacked by broadly-painted hijinks and easy moral lessons. And like Wall-E, it's incredibly watchable despite this.