What Goes Up

What Goes Up

107 Minutes

I’m embarrassed to admit that I fell for it. It didn’t take me too long to realize that I had been suckered into the screening room by savvy producers who recruited a recognizable and respectable ensemble to lure audiences into their irritating mess of a movie. I’ve seen enough movies to know that if after one minute you are saying to yourself, “I hope this gets better soon,” you are in for a viewing experience that is to be endured rather than enjoyed. It got worse at minute two. I smelled desperation when it became obnoxiously clear that it was one of those stories that wanted so badly to resonate as “important.” I glanced at the director’s statement and there it was: “What Goes Up is about heroism. The story asks the questions: Who are our heroes and why? How much of heroism is myth and how much real? And how do we fill the holes left behind when someone meaningful dies unexpectedly?” If ever I needed a hero to get me out a movie, it was now.

The official synopsis for What Goes Up reads something like this: it is 1986. After having an affair with an interview subject, covering up her suicide and proceeding to write a series of uplifting pieces about her, a cynical and morally-challenged New York reporter Campbell Babbitt (Steve Coogan) is sent to cover the hometown hoopla for local hero Christa McAuliffe. But rather than pursue his assignment, which leaves him cold, he follows a group of disaffected students, whose own hero – their beloved, unconventional teacher – has just died under a cloud of scandal. Their strange expressions of grief attract the reporter. He moves into their alternate universe, a willing “substitute teacher,” but descends into a web of lies and misplaced sexual desire with this group of confused and combustible youths who attempt to cast him as their new hero and teacher.

The gang of bratty, hormonal alienated teens includes Lucy (Hilary Duff), a Lolita-wannabe who may have been having an affair with the departed teacher; Tess (Olivia Thirlby), a brooding girl who may have been knocked up by her uncle and needs an abortion; and Jim (Josh Peck), a disturbed boy who masturbates while watching his neighbor breastfeed. Among their “passionate and, at times, ludicrous expressions of grief” are stealing the departed’s coffin and relocating it to a frozen lake, predatory sexual advances towards Babbitt, and anal sex with a crippled classmate.

Coogan shows us his darker streak but can’t find any logic a character who is grappling with a moral dilemma about his earlier deception and entertaining the idea of giving in to Lucy’s advances. A wasted Molly Shannon plays a lonely teacher who may likewise have had an affair with the departed “almost priest”, and sets her sights on Babbitt as an automatic romantic replacement. And by the way, in this midst of this deluge of teen angst, Babbitt also grabs a Pulitzer for his tainted series, restoring his relationship with his contemptuous editor just before the Challenger explodes. I may be wrong but I think this is the only movie in history to exploit a space tragedy as a cheap suspense-building device.

What Goes Up is overstuffed with plot threads that never come together and tonally incompatible approaches that result in bizarre juxtapositions too awkwardly constructed to be disturbing. I offer a more accurate version of the aforementioned official synopsis: It’s 2008. Against all odds and sans reasonable explanation, a talented group of actors try to make the best of really bad material. They fire their agents but still refuse to give up. They valiantly battle a horrible screenplay, amateurish direction, poor production values and technical problems only to find their efforts stymied at every turn. Are they in a raunchy teen sex farce or in a dark morally ambiguous comedy? Their bumbling director certainly has no clue. He offers the heroes little guidance so they are left alone to navigate the script’s jarring, incoherent and disjointed inconsistencies. In the end, their Sisyphean efforts generate some (very few) moments of honest emotion proving their commitment and professionalism to potential employers.

by Teri Carson