Up

THE FRIENDLY SKIES Barford takes flight.

Photo: Michael Brosilow

In 1982, L.A. truck driver Larry Walters tied a cluster of helium-filled weather balloons to a Sears deck chair and took flight, reportedly reaching a height of 16,000 feet. Carpenter’s warmhearted dramedy takes Walters’s few hours’ flight and 15 minutes of fame as its inspiration; we encounter fictionalized protagonist Walter Griffin (Barford) 16 years after his own airborne excursion, but his head is still in the clouds.

Walter spends his days sketching designs and building prototypes for further flying machines, trying to recapture his brief glory. His wife, Helen (Katz), supports the family as a mail carrier and passive-aggressively urges Walter to find paying work. Fifteen-year-old son Mikey (Cohen), meanwhile, meets Maria (Brosnahan), 16, six months pregnant and so aggressively precocious that Mikey’s first question is, “Are you an actress?” Oh, and famed tightrope walker Philippe Petit (Hernandez) visits Walter’s daydreams.

Up isn’t as cloyingly, whimsically quirky as this may sound. Carpenter writes some lovely domestic scenes, and her thematic resonances play out clearly in Shapiro’s well-calibrated production. The actors rise to the occasion, too; a second-act scene of nervy teenage disclosure between Brosnahan and Cohen—terrific young talents who reaffirm Erica Daniels’s casting acumen—left us agape. But a bit too much remains half-composed in Carpenter’s script: Is Walter an eccentric to be admired or just mentally ill? Or, as Carpenter seems to want it, both? Questions like this keep floating, untethered and unanswered, further and further from solid ground.

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