In the early days of the pandemic of March 2020, many of us probably had the urge to document the bizarre experience. The world was grinding to a halt, and millions of us were trapped in our homes with nothing to do but assess our lives amid low-grade panic and free-floating angst. If you kept a journal of that experience, it’s probably pretty tedious given how long the quarantine dragged on and how similar our experiences were to one another. This wasn’t some fascinating episode that happened to you personally—it was a dull and mind-numbing thing that happened to everyone. Why would we, three years later, want to revisit the experience?
This seems to be a question that the makers of Life Upside Down didn’t fully consider, or maybe they hoped that we’d collectively have enough psychic distance from those early days of lockdown to recall it fondly. But with the slow-motion train wreck of a public health crisis still ongoing, any hypothetical nostalgia for pandemic days has yet to appear. This is not good news for a film which locks itself in a handful of rooms and stays there with its slowly unraveling characters for nearly the duration of its runtime. Did no one involved in the production ask themselves, “Too soon?”
Almost like a tease, Life Upside Down, written and directed by Cecilia Miniucchi, opens with a fluid scene in an art gallery where the camera roams among a handful of characters. We gather that Jonathan Wigglesworth (Bob Odenkirk) is the gallery owner, eager to sell paintings to his well-heeled guests, especially Paul (Danny Huston). We also catch on that Jonathan is canoodling with Clarissa (Radha Mitchell) even as his wife (Jeanie Lim) hovers nearby. The scene strains toward comic and kinetic momentum as the camera orbits these characters, catching quick moments of wit and lust. Then the title card hits, “March 2020,” and all of that momentum grinds to a halt.
Fair enough; that was what it really felt like. Now we see these characters in isolation in their homes, mask dangling from an ear, disinfectant on the counter as they text and call and Facetime one another. Jonathan is stuck in quarantine with his wife, whom he wants to divorce, Paul is (seemingly) cozy with his wife, Rita (Rosie Fellner), and Clarissa is on her own. There’s a sympathy element that works for a while—we recognize the signs of couch fatigue—but it quickly begins to feel claustrophobic. The filmmakers have shared that the actors filmed their own scenes in isolation on phones and iPads and webcams, in the absence of a production crew, and that’s exactly what it looks like. Angles are canted in haphazard compositions that are sometimes interesting and sometimes distracting. The camera never moves, and instead we get shot after shot of these characters pacing the living room, flopping on the sofa, gazing out the window where the outside world is reflected but unattainable.
There are plenty of films that have used low-tech cameras for visceral effect, like Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane and Sean Baker’s Tangerine, but the choice here contributes to a sense of airlessness. There is no engrossing plot to tie the scenes together and leverage the immediacy of the technique. Instead, we get glimpses of couples losing patience with one another, and rushed calls between Jonathan and Clarissa as they bemoan the fact that they can’t get together and make love. Jonathan is unraveling because the lockdown has temporarily shuttered his art gallery, and he’ll go out of business unless he can get his loaded friend Paul to buy a painting. The script feels like it was the product of a brainstorm during a Zoom call with the cast, and then everybody grabbed their cameras and winged it from there. The stakes are remarkably low, considering that none of the characters is particularly appealing. Each of them lives in glaring privilege—high ceilings, big windows, a grand piano—and it becomes hard to sympathize with their collective plight, even though we were all going through similar things at the same time.
Odenkirk has established his bona fides as an actor of tremendous range and charisma in his roles in Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, but little of that spark is in evidence in his portrayal of the dour Jonathan. In fact, he’s upstaged by his literally faceless wife who is only filmed from the neck down (using various body doubles) except for in the opening and closing scenes. Huston seems to have more fun portraying a pretentious author who can’t connect with his vibrant wife. Mitchell gives a prickly and expressive performance as a woman in the midst of realizing what she really wants. (Clue: it’s the neighbor dude.)
Relatable elements underlie all of this. We hear the neighborhood cheering and banging pots and pans for medical workers, we remember how it was to disinfect every Amazon package that turned up on the stoop, how our phones sucked us into doomscrolling all day and night. In Life Upside Down, the world pauses, the characters change and everyone comes out in a different place from where they began, but does that make it a good movie? In fact, many of us probably experienced much more dramatic highs and lows than these characters, so watching it is like listening to someone complain about their hangnail when you’re the one who just walked over hot coals. Pandemic life might one day make for a story that connects with our collective and ongoing trauma in an enlightening way, but not today and not this movie. Too soon.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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