The Barrier Around the Seat

Rating: Null/10 (5 January 2010)

I wish I had seen this back to back with "The Informant!"
Both are good examples of what I think is a new phenomenon in film narrative. No, not exactly new; rather the techniques are maturing to the point that people don't notice them any more. And that's what you want.
It is a matter of ambiguous narration. We've always had this, even with silent movie cards. For 75 years or so (let's start with Kane), we've had the sliding notion of the narration of the storyteller, the "voiceover" narration of the protagonist, and the interior narration of one character to another. This latter is obvious in many bad science fiction movies where the professor patiently explains some key dynamics of the story. We accept that these can meld — have for decades.
But we now have a trend where we like to have narrative perspectives made discrete and explicit because we like to play games with what one knows that another does not, and how one can annotate another. So we have movies like "Informant," whose key hook is in weaving ambiguities among these platforms.
Here in "Up" is a more complex and delicate composition. First of all, instead of being built on the great confrontation between the big and little guy, it moves on the conflict between independent loneliness and risk in losing ones' self in another.
It is about love, is modern in the sense that it moves the tension into the narrative structure itself, and is tuned well, because Clooney knows what he is doing.
We have the on screen narrator, Clooney's character Bingham, who knows more than the character does. He narrates to a novice. He also narrates as a living, triggering change in other characters. We hear those characters as bona fide narrators. We hear Bingham to them, to himself, to his apprentice, and to a romantic possibility he finds. Its all about story, each one, and about the dissonances and overlaps among them.
The power comes from some large things and small.
The large device is obvious. The standard fold in films is to have an inner "film" of some kind that allows us to enter as participant. Here it is a remote video conferencing for one of the narrative threads, allowing us to fold in to that one only.
The "small" narrative device factors powerfully in the film, but the mechanism is somewhat hidden. The template we are expecting is the standard romantic pattern: love is found, lost and regained. This is broken: our guy does not get anything close to wholeness. He goes back to a hell of what both he and we know will be loneliness. The apprentice girl learning about love? Her life is ruined by a suicide that will haunt her, caused by inept handling of false narrative. The effectiveness of the folding device of video conferencing? Discarded as ineffective.
It all turns on our discovery that Bingham is himself a narrative, a distraction, a fabrication in the romantic sense. It comes from out of the blue because there are so many narrators, so many fabricators that we didn't notice the power of this one, Bingham's love interest played by Vera Farmiga. Her power is absolute and breaks everything. This could be a depressing movie if you are sensitive to job loss, suicide and disappointment in love. But it is designed to pass the narrative prerogative to you to handle, so is judged as "intelligent."
The inner plot is its own narrative. Two young lovers are getting married. One is related by birth, the other by being a salesman of the artificial. Bingham gives them the happiness he cannot have, that he has to deny himself. (There are hints that problems with his parents is the cause.) He literally at the end gives them his happiness in terms of the credits he has accumulated in his endeavors. This in substitute for their own fabricated happiness (in the form of a fake honeymoon).
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.