Up and Moscow, Belgium: Spouse and Home

Get ready for the tears. Viewers old enough to empathize with love, unfulfilled dreams, and death should grab some extra napkins with their popcorn on their way to Up, the latest from Disney/Pixar whose unlikely protagonist is a 78-year-old man named Carl. In an exquisitely rendered, dialogue-free four-minute opening montage—that rivals, of all things, Watchmen’s intro in terms of concisely telling a story that spans decades—we watch Carl and his childhood friend, Ellie, as they grow up, become husband and wife, suffer a miscarriage, face critical illness. From the time they were kids, their bond was their thirst for adventure, and they kept a scrapbook titled Stuff I’m Going to Do that held photos of the fun they’d had—and then, all too quickly, things they’d never get to check off.

It’s not quite a Bambi moment, but Carl’s backstory is about as wrenching a gut-punch as a kids’ flick can offer. And though there’s a hint of melancholy running through the film, whatever subsequent tears you shed while watching Up will mercifully be from laughter. Co-directors and -writers Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, both Pixar vets, have followed last year’s magnificent WALL*E with another triumph, one you could have never extrapolated based on its trailers or that now-ubiquitous image of a tiny house tethered to an explosion of balloons.

Paradise Falls, a sanctuary in South America, was Carl (voiced by Ed Asner) and Ellie’s ultimate destination. So when the former balloon salesman is about to lose their home to development—another heartbreaking subplot as the elderly man tries to fight it—Carl decides to go for the seemingly impossible and fly his house to Paradise Falls using a little ingenuity and a lot of helium. Unexpectedly along for the ride is Russell (Jordan Nagai), an 8-year-old scout who showed up at Carl’s door begging to help out with anything in order to get his Assisting the Elderly badge and ended up stuck on an airborne porch.

Up, you may have heard, is Pixar’s first 3-D film, but you don’t need to spring for the more expensive ticket to be visually wowed. Docter and Peterson stepped back from the photorealism of films such as Ratatouille and WALL*E to deliver animation that is more, well, cartoonish: Carl is squat with a potato of a nose, Russell is essentially an egg with limbs, the execs overseeing the development in Carl’s neighborhood are besuited triangles with shades. The film’s palette is juicily vibrant—those balloons (the animators used between 10,000 and 20,000 of them), the site of the house in the clouds, and the greens and brightly colored exotic animals in the forests of Paradise Falls give your eyes a sumptuous feast. One of the film’s few realistic renderings is the mist of the falls, and it is lovely.

Of course, there’s more to the story than an old man and a kid flying south. Once in Paradise Falls, Carl meets Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer), an adventurer he idolized as a kid but who turns out to love lucre more than he does thrills. Muntz and his army of dogs—outfitted with bark-to-English translation collars—provide the wrench in Carl’s exploration, especially after Russell befriends a nearly extinct bird he names Kevin, a species that Muntz has been searching for.

The perils of this battle, along with the script’s mournful components, earned Up a reasonable PG rating. But there is also plenty of silliness for younger children—and everyone else, really—to giggle at. The dogs’ talking collars are hilarious, as is Kevin’s impossibly comic warbling. Muntz’s only well-tempered, loyal-to-nice-folks canine, Dug (Peterson), offers both goofy laughs and Bolt-like emotion: When Carl gets upset with him, Dug sheepishly approaches after some time and says, “I was hiding under your porch because I love you. Can I stay?” (Trust me, it’s not as cheesy as it sounds.) Up, in fact, is pretty close to being a perfect outing at the movies. And considering the marvels Pixar has already given us year after year, that’s a stunning achievement.

Moscow, Belgium begins and ends with close-ups of Matty (Barbara Sarafian), a 41-year-old mother of three who, like Carl, could use an escape from a life that isn’t everything she’d hoped. As the film opens, first-time feature director Christophe Van Rompaey zooms his lens right on Matty’s prematurely haggard face as she walks, zombie-like, through a supermarket. Equally abstracted when she gets in her car, Matty backs up into a semi driven by the unpleasant, tank-top-wearing Johnny (Jurgen Delnaet). He bitches that he knows “women like you” and that it must be that time of the month. Matty unleashes a vicious analysis of Johnny right back. Romance is sure to follow.

This is no romantic comedy, however, and writers Jean-Claude Van Rijckeghem and Pat van Beirs certainly don’t make it obvious that Matty will ever have any interest in Johnny, who is only 29, clearly has anger issues, and is not very attractive on top of it. But her dressing-down impresses him, and he begins to court her relentlessly. Factor in Matty’s possibly permanent separation from her husband, Werner (Johan Heldenbergh), an art teacher who’s having an affair with one of his students, and, well, Johnny may not be ideal, but his attention is just the boost she needs. Soon enough, his truck cabin’s a-rockin’.

“There’s too much sadness in the world,” a customer tells Matty at her dreary post-office job in the working-class neighborhood of Moscou in Ghent. But for all its scripted dreariness, Moscow, Belgium plays like more of a comedy than a downer. The excellent Sarafian, who like a Belgian Frances McDormand can look homely in one scene and lovely in the next, makes Matty a fairly entertaining crank, sarcastically snipping at everyone from her 16-year-old daughter, Vera (Anemone Valcke), to her Hollywood-standard offbeat coworker to the two men in her life, no matter how nice they’re treating her. Matty and those who know of her dalliance—which she first pursues “to piss off my husband”—pretty much treat it as a joke.

When Werner considers making amends and Matty finds out about Johnny’s checkered past, however, the lark and its consequences turn more serious. A scene in which Johnny lets his cheery new-boyfriend façade slip is terrifically tense and sobering, as is a dinner where Werner and Johnny nearly crack each other’s skulls and Vera brings home an unexpected guest. The film’s portrait of a middle-class family and its daily clashes, both major and minor, is spot-on.

Moscow, Belgium’s climax is another story, however. Just when you expect the plot to go one way, it whiplashes to a different ending—and though surprise is often a good thing in a movie, here the script just doesn’t make much sense. But then there’s Matty’s close-up again, this time her face beaming. The film may not make you believe in Matty’s choice, but Sarafian certainly convinces you that her character is finally happy.