I agree with Dahlia about the pole dance of grief in Away We Go: The amateur night performance of barren Munch Garnett (Melanie Lynskey), while riveting and poignant, indeed seemed like it belonged in a different movie. Like Dana, I thought the quirky, uneven road movie had some great moments along the hapless, mapless, trip of expecting parents seeking their adult selves. For example, Maya Rudoph was a pitch perfect Verona, asking her goofy but loveable boyfriend, Burt (John Krasinki), “Are we fuck-ups?” (My husband, who usually is a good sport about chick flicks, audibly conceded that indeed they could be.)

When miscarriage and profound disappointment were added to the narrative, though, the couple’s journey became about more than simply growing up the hard way. Perhaps director Sam Mendes has his own issues over fertility? As Dana warned us last year, the mid-century unplanned pregnancy in Mendes' Revolutionary Road (starring Mrs. Mendes, Kate Winslet) was not resolved “by a happy family picnic.” I was, nevertheless, happy to see Lynskey in the complex role of Away We Go’s mother who could not bear children. It was a big leap from her role of Rose, a multifaceted stalker on the long-running CBS comedy, Two and Three Quarters Men, and I was glad to see her acting range.

Photograph of Melanie Lynskey and Chris Messina in Away We Go courtesy of Focus Films.

Tags: miscarriage; Away We Go; two and a half men;

A few weeks back, Meghan and Emily posted about the poignant, brief pregnancy loss scene in Pixar’s Up. It was a doubly powerful rendering of miscarriage and grief, because it happened silently, in the midst of a gregarious, dreamy children’s movie. I am wondering what you all thought of the miscarriage scene in Away We Go, Sam Mendes’ new film about pregnant slackers seeking a home.

As Dana’s already pointed out, it’s not a perfect movie. Too many cartoon characters bouncing around cartoonishly (although Allison Janey, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Josh Hamilton are such brilliantly wrought caricatures, it hardly matters). But as soon as we meet Melanie Lynskey, playing hip Montreal supermom, Munch Garnett, we know something different is coming.

Munch can’t conceive, and has thus adopted a Victorian houseful of impossibly tidy, polite children with perfect pitch. But the instant she finds herself in a room with the explosively pregnant Verona (played by Maya Rudolph), it’s clear Munch is being devoured by something. And later that evening, after a good amount of wine, Munch takes to the stage at an open mic night to perform the saddest, least sexy pole dance ever witnessed, all jerking head and hollow eyes. Her husband, Tom, played by Chris Messina, explains that Munch has just suffered her fifth miscarriage. He can’t take his eyes off her as he describes the blasted hope of yet another pregnancy lost. I found the scene completely devastating, in part because it’s narrated by the grieving husband, and in part because it captured something of the way miscarriage yanks away your sense of yourself as a mom, the kind with the stretchy leggings, and forces you to become some other kind of woman, overnight. The precocious little adopted girl who opens the door to Rudolph and John Krasinski earlier that same evening, telegraphs all this when she explains that her mom is still upstairs, changing into a short skirt.

And something about Tom’s confession leads Krasinski and Rudolph to change their minds about moving to Montreal. Tom and Munch aren't the perfect family anymore.

Courtney at Feministing says she “absolutely detested” the pole dance scene, and I can see why it offends. But it affected me the same way the miscarriage scene in Up affected me; I couldn’t breathe. I wonder if that’s because we still talk about pregnancy loss so rarely and so poorly, or because it conveyed almost too much about sex, hope, love, loss, grief, longing, and the silence and shame that come with it.

Still of Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski in Away We Go © 2009 Focus Features.

Tags: miscarriage; Away We Go

Proof that, as Emily says, Pixar's Up is for everyone: I took 10 11-year-old boys to it for my son's birthday, a little nervously, hoping an animated movie involving helium balloons wouldn't seem childish. At least some of them have seen their share, now, of James Bond and Family Guy and Austin Powers and South Park and whatnot. Sitting behind them, I watched their riveted, upturned faces as, in between fistfuls of popcorn, they absorbed the emotional montage of the couple's life together, including the brief but harrowing scene of the pregnancy loss.

My son worried afterward that it was a little downerish for a birthday party—not your usual laser tag, or even Transformers—but overall they seemed to really like the movie and were affected by the sequences that Emily and Meghan described. One of my son's friends reported without embarassment that he started to cry during the montage portion. This was reported as he and the others were dashing around the outside movie plaza firing little discs from disc-firing guns (I know, it's awful that I bought them, but CVS didn't have enough water pistols, which I guess are also taboo in some households, though not mine) from his goody bag. I like these boys, unafraid of the sensitive side of their nature. It did seem a little too bad that, as is so often the case in movies and children's stories, the death of a central female character (usually a mother; here a wife) provides the catalyst for adventure, and my daughter complained afterward that there weren't enough female characters. (The only other one we could identify was the bird.) I do look forward to the upcoming Pixar movies that actually, finally, feature females. Fodder, perhaps, for a 12th birthday party, unless by that point the boys insist upon something by Judd Apatow.

Tags: boys, Pixar, Up

The miscarriage in Up has stayed with me, too, Meghan, because of the emotion packed into a slim 20 seconds, and also because it opens the movie to adults who don't have kids. In fact, that opening out into different audiences captures one of the movie's several wonderful themes. Dana pointed out the motley nature of the crew that goes on Up's adventure. It teaches, without ever preaching, a lesson about finding love and chosen family wherever you can. Spoiler alert: In the last scene, square-jawed widower Carl sits next to kid Russell on the boy's favorite curb, where he and his dad used to go to count red cars and blue cars. The dad is gone, into the clutches of a woman who we've been briefly told has admonished Russell about calling too much. And so Carl and Russell count the cars, and argue over whether to count a motorcycle, and we glimpse the rare possibility of a random encounter made into love. And are reminded that it shouldn't be so rare.

Tags: chosen family, Pixar, Up

Seeing Pixar's Up reminded me of the power of images to say what words cannot—and especially of the power of film to convey how fleeting and mysterious a lifespan is. Buried in this children's flick is one of the most moving sequences about grief and mourning I have ever seen in a film. Over in Slate, I've been writing about how hard it is to find expressions of grief or mourning that feel equivalent to the actual experience of bereavement. Up contains one of them. I actually had to leave in tears halfway through. The sequence comes at the opening (small spoiler alert) when the film tells the story of a boy and a girl who meet-cute through their love of old-style adventurers: We watch as the shy boy, adorned in aviation goggles, wanders into the clubhouse of an outspoken girl (also wearing goggles) and gets teased into falling in love (and falling from a shaky attic rafter after a botched attempt to be brave). The film then speeds through a montage of their life together, repeatedly returning to their dream of going to the sublime Paradise Falls in South America. It's a relatively modest fantasy that, like so many in life, is never achieved. They age, and then one day the wife grows ill; we glimpse as she spends the end of her days in bed looking at a book she made as a child, with Paradise Falls on the cover and pages dedicated to "Stuff I'm Going To Do." We presume these pages are empty, because those particular adventures never were had. There's another adventure that was never had: the adventure of having children; she had a miscarriage and, it seems, cannot bear more children. When she dies, she leaves behind a lonely husband bent on guarding the home they built together. Every day, he touches his hand to a handprint she made on their mailbox when they first moved in. Every day, he talks to her portrait on the wall. We witness the abiding intimacy of grief.

In a culture remarkably averse to facing the enduring reality of bereavement (and averse, too, to the depiction of what it's like to grow old), Up has done exactly what the overhyped Curious Case of Benjamin Button failed to accomplish. It's encapsulated the mystery and the monumentality of two tiny lives, and made you feel, in their disruption, the dislocation all of us will some day feel. It's not exactly uplifting, but it is inspiring.

Tags: grief, mourning, Pixar, Up