Life Upside Down Review: A Lockdown Comedy That Takes Half-Hearted Aim at Privilege

The film could aim with a bit more precision at the price of its characters’ evident comfort.

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Life Upside Down
Photo: IFC Films

“It’s boring everywhere,” Clarissa (Radha Mitchell) complains in the latter part of Cecilia Miniucchi’s Life Upside Down, which is set in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Minucchi’s light satire of bourgeois illusions mines the boredom of the early weeks of lockdown for observational comedy. Quite literally observational, as the fact that Life Upside Down was shot largely remotely, with the actors responsible for their own mobile device-based camera rigs, lends the film a surveillant aesthetic all too suited to its setting.

That life during the lockdown took on the drab, static quality of an image produced by an iPhone strapped to a tripod would seem to be the point. Miniucchi emphasizes the difference between life before and after March 2020 by opening her film with a roving oner, forcefully shot by a camera that produces a considerably warmer, more cinematic image than the later mobile-device footage. This clever contrast of visual styles corresponds to the drollness of Miniucchi’s script, namely in its reasonably satisfying, if not particularly pointed, demonstration of how the façades of everyday social relations crumbled under pandemic conditions.

In that extended shot that comprises the prologue, we roam around the opening of an art show, meeting gallery owner Jonathan (Bob Odenkirk), who sneaks off for a quickie with Clarissa just as his wife (Jeanie Lim) arrives at the show. When he’s not in flagrante with Clarissa, he’s courting the attention and pocketbook of her friend Paul (Danny Huston), a successful writer and potential art buyer, kowtowing to the latter’s arbitrary interpretations of abstract art.

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Cut to a few days later, and this more or less normal state of upper-middle-class things gets turned on its head—almost literally, as the film’s title is introduced over drone footage of the L.A. skyline that rotates until up is down—when lockdowns are ordered. The illicit lovers soon find their affair impeded and unequal, with the single Clarissa perpetually available to sext and coo over FaceTime, and the married Jonathan only nabbing snippets of time while his wife is occupied. He’s also growing increasingly distant from Clarissa, as well as anxious for the survival of the gallery, as Paul has backed off from his suggestion that he’d purchase a painting.

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Touch and physical proximity may be vital to the continuation of a torrid love affair, but it may prove toxic to the passionless May-December marriage of Paul and Rita (Rosie Fellner). The pedantic pseudo-intellectual spends his days proudly boasting to his barely tolerant wife about his forthcoming book of what sounds like the most banal of all possible political commentary: The Dangerous Stupidity of Those in Power. Huston turns his natural affability into oblivious smugness, as a man so brimming over with complacent self-satisfaction that he doesn’t appear to notice that his wife either doesn’t care or doesn’t understand his facile political tracts.

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Huston’s overconfident Paul nicely complements Odenkirk’s turn as the harried gallery owner. Jonathan, a slightly toned-down version of Odenkirk’s smarmy Saul Goodman, tries to butter the neglected Clarissa up on quick trips to take out the trash, out of the sight of his wife, whom we only catch glimpses of in the background. Clarissa, as the reasonably sane character who knows both men, serves as the implicit point-of-view character on these two outsized masculine egos. And while waiting through Jonathan’s hollow reassurances, she also notices, seemingly for the first time, her eccentric but attractive-enough tenant, Darius (Cyrus Pahlavi), in the yard.

Minucchi toggles between these three stories like she’s selecting different Zoom windows, giving us peeks at how L.A. bougies went about losing and reconstructing their comforts in the early days of the pandemic. Tucking the liberal class’s demonstrably responsible safety measures and coping mechanisms into the margins of these fly-on-the-wall shots, Minucchi brings us back to the days of going for runs in cloth masks. And the film has a prescient eye toward how silly such briefly lived practices would seem three years later; a gag involving a pasta maker as a supremely meaningless birthday present earns its chuckle/groan of recognition.

Sometimes, though, it’s apparent that this exposure of the pettiness of these wealthy characters’ motivations comes from a place of privilege itself. Life Upside Down takes place in an ensconced universe where everyone has the latest iPad, but no one appears to use theirs to interface with the disaster unfolding in the section of the world where people can’t afford new pasta makers for their estranged lovers. The characters’ solipsistic focus on their own middle-age ennui while the world burns around them doesn’t itself become an object of critique.

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While it offers a bemusing and intelligently constructed look at the ways life was altered for a select few whose life was already based on smoke, mirrors, and forced readings of abstract art, Life Upside Down could aim with a bit more precision at the price of its characters’ evident comfort. Its ending suggesting the cyclical nature of the status quo is hardly delivered as the class critique it probably should be, and this makes some of its easygoing humor read retrospectively as glibness. Though perhaps this depiction of an essentially unperturbed ruling class dusting itself off after a slight pandemic ends up suggesting, if inadvertently, that only the revolution could really turn their heavily fortified lives upside down.

Score: 
 Cast: Bob Odenkirk, Radha Mitchell, Danny Huston, Rosie Fellner, Cyrus Pahlavi, Jeanie Lim  Director: Cecilia Miniucchi  Screenwriter: Cecilia Miniucchi  Distributor: IFC Films  Running Time: 88 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2023

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

1 Comment

  1. I love this commentary! I was so hopeful that we’d see some amazing work emerge from the Covid years. That the sudden wellspring of free time would provoke some kind of flowering of creativity, like when Newton revolutionized the world thanks to his university being shutdown from a plague outbreak.

    Instead, all I’ve seen come from it, are a litany of sloppily shot barely disguised auto-biographical films about poor, poor rich folk who have to contend with the boredom of life in their beautiful homes, safely ensconced from the realities of a the greatest global catastrophe since WWII. I saw no effort on the parts of these people to try and grow or do something daring with the time they had. Instead they just creatively masturbated.

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