Coming home
Celebrating excess is over. Instead, pop culture is exploring where we belong - and why.
Something is in the air, and it's not just Carl Frederickson's cozy pastel cottage in the Disney/Pixar hit "Up."
With an economy mired in a slump brought on by go-go mortgage-lending and skyrocketing foreclosures, the housing entertainment TV bubble has popped. Meanwhile, movies like "Up," "Away We Go," and "Summer Hours" are asking profound questions about finding our way back to where we belong. Remember the old Burt Bacharach/Hal David pop song "A House Is Not a Home"? If the duo were penning it today, they'd probably stand the sentiment on its head and call it "A Home Is Not a House."
If there's a new genre of nesting stories, these movies may be the tip of the iceberg. The TV schedule, meanwhile, is mired in the bottom of the cycle. The home makeover fantasy highlighted by the hit 2000-08 TV show "Trading Spaces" ran its course and ran aground last year, just in time for the collapse of the market. Cable network HGTV now spotlights shows called "Cash in the Attic," "Designed to Sell," and "Bang for the Buck" - you can practically see the cartoon sweat-drops flying off the schedule.
Reality shows about the families filling those houses aren't looking so rosy, either. "Jon and Kate Plus 8" is a case study of the stress-fractures assailing the average family with (too many) kids: The Gosselins may have moved into a new $1.1 million home befitting their 24/7 fame, but more space hasn't brought greater happiness, just a bevy of tabloid headlines.
Their previous house, meanwhile, still sits on the block unsold. Other shows on The Learning Channel about couples and their plus-sized litters now evoke parental schadenfreude and a sense of excess, with "Octomom" Nadya Suleman a cultural joke and offscreen worst-case scenario. In their uneasiness, viewers are turning to the comfort fixings of Food Network shows like "Ace of Cakes" and "Cooking for Real."
Meanwhile, over at the nation's box office, something interesting is happening: The overarching cultural nervousness - where is home? What does it mean? - is reflected in motion pictures. "Up," a CGI comedy about a 74-year-old man's search for a cosmic re-lo, grossed $130 million in two weeks. In the art-houses, the latest smash hit is "Away We Go," an eccentric road movie about two bohemian parents-to-be searching for home. And not just any home but the right home - a secure, lasting place from which to both confront the world and hide from it.
Given the larger foreclosure on our hopes for an ever-expanding economic future, the audience response may be more than academic. These movies obliquely address and soothe our fears about where we're going and where we'll live when we get there. In its opening scenes, "Up" offers a geriatric's nightmare, with the home owned by widower Carl Frederickson (voiced by Ed Asner) surrounded by encroaching skyscrapers. The local developers are soulless, faceless Men in Black; the only way out is to sell the house and shuffle off to the retirement home.
Or you could go . . . up. The movie sends Carl and cottage aloft via thousands of brightly colored balloons, searching for the ideal South American waterfall by which to land. That's one way to deal with the repo man, and if it's a dream of escape, the movie continues its obsession with home over the long haul. Literally so: The vision of Carl and his Wilderness Explorer sidekick, Russell (Jordan Nagai), dragging the airborne house behind them by garden hose is a potent image that may sum up how many of us feel when we write the mortgage check. It namechecks the Myth of Sisyphus and the "must go on" of "Waiting for Godot"; at the same time, that bobbing chunk of real estate metaphorizes the burden of our belongings in a way even a kid can understand.
"Up," in fact, is full of lost souls searching for home: the fatherless Russell, the giant bird Kevin separated from her nestlings, the talking dog, Dug, in search of a master. The film's ultimate message is that home is the people we care for, a moral trite but true and one creatively arrived by taking the long way round.
"Summer Hours" isn't so sure. The current French import plunges into the anxiety with its tale of grown siblings grappling with how to divvy up their deceased mother's estate. The older son (Charles Berling) discovers to his shock that their childhood country house means little to his brother (Jeremie Renier) and sister (Juliette Binoche), both of whom carry their lives on their backs like modern global nomads. You can't take up residence solely in your memories - this is Carl Frederickson's lesson too.
One can imagine Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph), the central couple of "Away We Go," taking in all these options with growing distress. Sam Mendes's film, written by husband and wife novelists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, argues that a shaggy twosome with baby on the way and a sudden windfall of cash would tour North America looking for the right place to raise their child.
In the process, they test out various versions of the parents they might become: "Away We Go" is at heart a kaleidoscope of nesting options seen from an attractive if smug alt-lifestyle remove. There are the shrill suburbanites (Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan), alternately ignoring and belittling their doughy children; the horrific New Age superparents (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton); the struggling single dad (Paul Schneider); the giddy empty-nesters (Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels). And so on. At its most poignant, "Away We Go" envisions the specific hell of a funny, intelligent, caring couple (Melanie Lynskey and Chris Messina) who are the perfect adoptive parents and unable to have their own.
Life's not fair, says the movie in alternately glib and touching fashion, so hunker down and make the best of what you've got. That "Away We Go" lets Burt and Verona ultimately find a home both rooted in family connections and strikingly impractical (it's waterfront, though - doesn't that count for something?) is evidence that the questions raised by the film aren't easily answered by anything except real estate fantasy.
Perhaps that's why its title evokes running away rather than coming home. "Up," up, and "Away We Go," and where we land, nobody - not even the movies - knows.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com 