Exchange of Realities

It’s not often I watch a movie and find multiple techniques worth discussing, but watching “Up” definitely made for an exception to that rule.

Along with a beautiful display of economy of dialogue, “Up” demonstrated a technique I have a distinct fondness for: making a physically absent character as active a part of the storyline as any of the speaking/acting parts. “Up” does this through its missing fifth main character, Ellie Fredericksen.

It’s not much of a spoiler to anyone who’s seen the previews or read the reviews for up that she isn’t physically present in the storyline, and the entertainment industry as a whole has a bit of a bad record with the deaths of female characters. I’ll admit to a bit of trepidation when I’d heard about Ellie and her connection to the plotline of “Up”, but I’m glad to inform you that I was pleasantly surprised.

See, Ellie is everywhere. Even in the backstory, it’s clear she’s the mover and the shaker; she was the one who ‘claimed’ the old house, the one who considers crossing a gap in the attic on a board no biggie, the one who introduces the “cross your heart” thematic that pervades the story (and doesn’t take no for an answer). She was the one who came to Carl—visiting him in the hospital, proposing to him (go Ellie!), coming to where he stands with the balloon stand.

The props most important to the story, similarly, are all hers. She’s established with three: her Adventure Book, the grape soda cap pin she gives to Carl when they first meet and she lets him into her club (something “not just any kid with goggles and a pilot hat” can get into), and even the house itself. All three of them are perpetual elements in the story; Carl never goes anywhere without the pin, the book crops up almost constantly, and the house—well, one doesn’t have to watch too far to see how important the house, and keeping it the way they both did, is to Carl.

And Carl himself carries a narrative link to her with at least as much strength as any I’ve ever seen in fiction. It’s not just the perpetual use of the items, or the carefully straightening up the house. It’s also in his actions. He talks to her a lot, even though she isn’t there. (At one point Russell gets in on the “conversation”, leading to Carl’s priceless “I already told him no!”) Even with her gone, he thinks as much in “we” as in “I”; “My wife and I were your biggest fans!” he gushes when he runs into the self-exiled Muntz in the jungles of Paradise Falls. And when it comes time for him to make his decision, she is as vital to it as anyone else in the story.

One of my sourcebooks once defined the character a movie is ‘about’ as being the one who sets everything in motion, the one whose actions the characters are all in response to, the driving force behind much of the storyline. And in the end, that leads us to an interesting conclusion: in its purest essence, “Up” is as much about Ellie as it is about Carl. That they can do this, without her being physically present past the first fifteen minutes, is a tribute to the storytelling in and of itself.