Upstream Color opens Friday, April 12, at SIFF Cinema Uptown.
I went into Upstream Color expecting something metaphysical: that is, based on the swirling words around the title, some exploration of the unseen; more specifically, some kind of constant, over-arching organism connecting us, connecting it, all.
What I got, over the first thirty minutes, anyway: A woman abducted, electrically shocked into unconsciousness, drugged through being forcefed a worm, woken into a worm-induced state of acquiescence, forced through said state to sign over money she doesn’t really have, and then dumped,a discarded cheeseburger wrapper from a buffet of bizarre crime.
Shane Carruth, director, writer, star, and everything-else-big on this shoot, shows a simultaneously lively and panoramic view of everything. Injecting the divine, the overarching, into the quotidian, remains important work attempted by all too few. Problem for Carruth, though: Terrence Malick showed up with To The Wonder (see its own SunBreak review here), gobbling up the whole game plan.
So Upstream gives you a fair amount about pigs, and synthesizers, and obsessively recording outdoorsy sometimes-ambient noises; and the pitfalls of modern dating—hell, the pitfalls of modern living, especially when you’ve got a past you can’t escape and you have to choose how much of it to hide, and until when. And more pigs. And the suggestion, at least, that it’s all interwined.
What’s missing here, what Malick caught instead: An underlying reason for something. Anything. Motivations here seem either opaque or stunningly obvious. When you open your metaphysics with a person deliberately, systematically, doing harm to another human being who’s done nothing to warrant any of it (nothing revealed at least—same thing), you dig yourself a deep hole. Hell, even psychedelic rangers who dose people—which I do not condone, which I find grossly neglectful and irresponsible—have their reasons. They want to throw people through the French windows of reality.
That’s bad, but it slimly beats out a nothing, however gloriously pulsing.
