Up, Up and Away
A little while back, I blogged about a Brazilian priest who floated off into the sky on a chair hoisted by helium balloons. My sisterwoman Val MacEwan posted a comment saying I needed to order Danny Deckchair from Netflix ASAP. Which I did.
If you haven’t seen it, you need to. Seriously. This 2003 Australian-produced indie film is sheer delight, the sort of movie you smile and giggle all the way through and come away from feeling as euphoric as if you’ve been breathing pure oxygen with chasers of laughing gas for 90 minutes.
It’s zany, whimsical, absurd, loony and utterly charming. I suppose it might be loosely called a “screwball romantic comedy,” in the flaky style of the classic “Bringing Up Baby” (with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant chasing a tiger around upper-crust Connecticut enclaves) and “Continental Divide” (with John Belushi and Blair Brown watching eagles in the Rockies.) All the cast members turn in impeccably on-point performances, the comedy is perfectly timed, the romance is low-key and uncloying, and the two main characters are hands down the cutest and most endearing people on the planet (Miranda Otto of Lord of the Rings fame and Rhys Ifans, whose face you’ll undoubtedly recognize from dozens of movies.)
There’s not a lot of truly “feel-good” flicks out there, though dozens are advertised as such. This is the real deal…and it takes A LOT for a movie to make me “feel good.” Is it a life-changing movie? Hell, no. But it does, gently and humorously, remind us why we’ve been granted a human existence — to find our true selves, find friends who understand who we really are beneath the stereotypic facade of demographics, do good for whom we can and live the dream we didn’t know we had.
For the hero of Danny Deckchair, it took floating off into the sky and landing in a totally different place where no one knew him. Hopefully, for us, we won’t have to go to such extremes to accomplish the task.
–phoebe kate