Mark Reviews Movies: LIFE UPSIDE DOWN (2023)

Life Upside Down, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 26, 2023

Here's yet another movie set and filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic that directly addresses its impact on the lives of seemingly ordinary people. The characters in Life Upside Down are an art gallery owner, a college professor, and a retired college professor who's currently working on a book, so "ordinary" is a bit of a stretch, just as writer/director Cecilia Miniucchi doesn't make much of a stretch in coming up with these characters, their problems, and this plot.

To be fair, it's difficult to tell how much the pandemic affected the initial idea for and production of this movie. Some text at the end announces that almost the entirety of the movie was made remotely, with the actors isolated with cameras and a crew overseeing production in separate locations. The sole exceptions to that process are the first and last shots, with the initial, panning long-take showing us those actors interacting without any health-minded limitations. Did the pandemic interrupt the production, or was this scene saved for later, after the crisis settled to some extent? Basically, did Miniucchi have to drastically alter her plans, or was the movie always planned this way?

Any kind of speculation almost doesn't matter, because the movie that's here is the movie the filmmakers made and the one we got. After watching so many stories set during the pandemic that try to replicate the feeling of having a lot of communication online with scenes exclusively using video chats, Miniucchi's approach is a bit refreshing. To be sure, the movie is mostly characters talking to each other on their phones or laptops, but the perspective isn't from the cameras of those devices. Oh, they're from devices with lower picture quality than your typical film camera, giving the whole thing the feeling of watching these people like some kind of voyeur, but we're not just starting at faces in close-up for 90 minutes.

It's a small favor, but that's where we're at with such experiments in shelter-in-place filmmaking. The little details, such as actually seeing whole bodies and not having scenes restricted to whatever conversations might be happening online, do make a difference.

They're not much of difference, though, when it comes to the actual story being told in this case. Here, we follow Jonathan Wigglesworth (Bob Odenkirk), who opens an art gallery in Los Angeles a few months before the pandemic will become an international crisis.

Obviously, he and the other guests have no idea of what's to come, so he's trying to have as much time as he can with Clarissa (Radha Mitchell), the college professor with whom Jonathan is having an affair, and to sell a painting to her friend Paul (Danny Huston), a wealthy professor-turned-author. Meanwhile, Jonathan is trying to keep the affair from his wife, who's played by Jeanie Lim in the opening scene, the ending one, and a single cut-away shot, while a double distractingly fills in for the actor in such a way that the character's face is always, often awkwardly facing away from the camera.

In March of 2020, the three are stuck in their respective homes. Jonathan and Clarissa try to talk frequently, but with his wife almost always in the house with him, Jonathan is a bit too remote in this remote romance. Also, his newly opened gallery is now closed for the foreseeable future, and no one wants to buy any art under such uncertain conditions.

For her part, Clarissa strikes up a friendly relationship the tenant (played by Cyrus Pahlavi) on her property, just reminding us how easy these characters have had it and relatively continue to have it under these circumstances. All the while, the constant and close proximity is making Paul realize just how different he and his wife Rita (Rosie Fellner) are, and eventually, we start to suspect she might feel the same way about their relationship, although Paul is too caught up in trying to write to notice himself.

Miniucchi's focus on characters and relationships, as opposed to sickness and statistics and politics (For a while, Paul seems to exist in this story to include some of those things, from his ill mother in a retirement home to his belief that stupidity will be the end of society), is slightly refreshing, but that's only by way of comparison to other projects like this one. The limitations of the pandemic aren't the only ones affecting Life Upside Down. There's just not much to these broadly conflicted characters and these artificially entangled relationships to make us care about watching them bicker and their troubles play out while far more important things are happening in the world around them.

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