by JL Wall

I suppose I’m a little late to the party, but I went to see the movie last night and quite enjoyed it. This will have some (important, I suppose) plot spoilers, so beware. In fact, to stall and take up physical space so that you have time to avert your eyes if you so desire, I’m going to direct you to an interesting use of “Partly Cloudy,” the short which precedes it, in discussing Caritas in Veritate.

Anyway, onto the flick:

After Carl has put out the fire Muntz sets under his house and drags it, alone, to its place next to the falls, he steps inside and sees, along with the audience, a different home than the one he is accustomed to. What was once organized and pristine is a mess, filled with toppled furniture and broken possessions. The thought that entered my mind immediately (and perhaps this says something about me) is Wendell Berry’s: “A house is not a home.”

Berry was making a comment about contemporary places of residence, one that would not surprise if it came from Carl’s mouth earlier in the movie. He’s offered a large sum to sell his property to the developer who has bought up the rest of the neighborhood, but refuses. It’s presumably enough that he might be able to live in one of the apartments built on the very site, but this doesn’t suffice for the same reason a retirement “home” won’t: they’re both just houses; where he is now is his home. The rest of the movie takes place because of his determination to save that home.

But he ultimately mistakes the physical house for the home itself. In order to save the house, he allows Muntz to capture Kevin (“the monster of Paradise Falls”), leaving her children without protection and destroying that home. He rearranges the interior and opens Ellie’s childhood “Adventure Book” again, to find that she had filled in the pages reserved for “What I’m Going to Do.” This is the movie’s crucial moment of realization: the importance of love and family to, among other things, the making of a home from a house. It spurs him to the decision to save Kevin from and bring her back to her children: but more than that, it spurs him to open himself to receiving the love of others again.

Ultimately, Carl has to sacrifice the house to save himself, Russell, Dug, and Kevin. It’s this understanding which allows him to do so. Kevin is brought back to her children, and as the movie closes, the other three have returned to the more familiar world of everyday 21st century America, where they form an odd “family” of their own. Each was originally alone: Carl, a childless widower viewed by society as an out-of-place relic; Russell, essentially abandoned by his father; Dug, rejected by his fellow dogs because, well, he loves. The solution to the breakups of their original families, for various reasons, is not miraculous healing but the coming together of this strange little band of refugees.

That’s where it leaves them, I’m fairly certain: refugees in the modern world.

     Filed under: family, media/culture