Here are some things you can look forward to in Aloft: a pig giving birth in the opening shot, numerous sex scenes where the characters seem to be enjoying themselves as much as the aforementioned pig, and a pigish mother who is glorified for abandoning her children to become a faith healer.
Sound like your cup of porky miserabilism? This is the feel-bad movie of the year that makes you feel even worse once you realize it’s all for nothing.
The story jumps between two time periods. The earlier one follows a mother’s struggle to raise her two sons — one of whom is fatally ill — after the death of her husband. The second timeline takes place about 25 years later as a journalist and the older son journey to a reclusive place in the northernmost part of Canada.
Beautiful, ponderous shots of ice and forests imply that you should take this movie very, very seriously. It deals with essential themes of memory, loss, grief, and faith; it’s about searching for meaning and healing in a cold wasteland and finding warmth through the search. And then there’s some indistinguishable meaning behind some falcons and nature and art.
Admittedly, the reason everyone is so sad is eventually unveiled after over an hour of unnecessary confusion. Like Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, all the characters are aware of a tragedy that has occurred, but it’s not revealed to the audience until much later in the film. This device works very well in Egoyan’s work because it allows us to focus on the universality of the characters’ suffering rather than the particulars of their situation.
Though, where Exotica’s great reveal actually revealed something of human nature, Aloft simply uses it as a contrived plot device to try to hold the viewer’s interest in what is otherwise a dull melodrama.
The most crucial character change is the mother’s acceptance of her role as a faith healer. It creates the strain in her relationship with her son, but more importantly, it links the two timelines together. You would think we would be given a reason for her drastic and abrupt shift from skepticism to devotion, but it’s simply not in the film.
Aloft doesn’t think coherence matters. Rather than tell a conventional story, it wants to be a tone poem or a parable that doesn’t need to make logical sense. Despite the dreamy mood created by a cold visual palette and the often discontinuous editing, the issue with this film’s deeper layer is that the development is muddled the same way as the plotting.
“But nature does not judge the darkness or the light and so it is unpredictable,” the mother says at the end of the film, as an image of the falcon projects onto the screen. This final speech is meant to define the metaphor, but it tightens things up as much as a belt that sags on the loosest belt hole. Not only is her statement nonsensical lip-flap, but it makes even less sense with the context of what the falcon does in the film.
Do you get it? If so, maybe you’re the falcon — as high as the sky. How’s that for a metaphor?
