A delightfully weird movie directed by --- no surprises there! --- Miranda July.
This is the kind of movie that could never succeed without actors who know how to play the material just right, so let's start with Richard Jenkins and the unrecognizable Debra Winger, shall we? Could these two be any better? They play a married couple (or at least a couple) who try to live off the grid but in the middle of Los Angeles, a tricky business. They have all sorts of conspiracies about how the government, big business, etc. is trying to mind control people, so they don't do things like shop in stores, have an online presence, bathe, things like that. Instead, they spend every waking moment coming up with cockamamie schemes to steal and rob whatever they can. They're raising their daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) in this environment, and things seem to be going ok, or as ok as such a situation could ever be, when the family dynamic is upset by the addition of a normal person from the actual world (Gina Rodriguez) who wakes Wood up to all the ways her parents have failed to show her love or even affection.
If you are the kind of viewer who demands realism from your movies, this one will try your patience. There are at least a couple of events in this film (like what happens to Rodriguez's apartment, and those of you who've seen it know what I'm talking about) that not just strain credibility but try mighty hard to entirely break it. But the thing is, they don't. They feel credible within the world July creates in her movie, a world that's just a hair out of kilter with the world as we actually know it. And for me, everything worked.
Well, almost everything. I didn't love the lesbian themes that become increasingly prominent as the movie progresses, not because I have a problem with lesbian themes in general, but rather because they didn't feel well integrated into this particular story. But the movie is about loving and being loved in return, and there are all kinds of love, so in the end that too mostly worked for me.
Evan Rachel Wood is sensational, but this movie is stolen by, of all people, Gina Rodriguez. Who would ever have thought?
One of 2020's standout movies.
Grade: A
This is the kind of movie that could never succeed without actors who know how to play the material just right, so let's start with Richard Jenkins and the unrecognizable Debra Winger, shall we? Could these two be any better? They play a married couple (or at least a couple) who try to live off the grid but in the middle of Los Angeles, a tricky business. They have all sorts of conspiracies about how the government, big business, etc. is trying to mind control people, so they don't do things like shop in stores, have an online presence, bathe, things like that. Instead, they spend every waking moment coming up with cockamamie schemes to steal and rob whatever they can. They're raising their daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) in this environment, and things seem to be going ok, or as ok as such a situation could ever be, when the family dynamic is upset by the addition of a normal person from the actual world (Gina Rodriguez) who wakes Wood up to all the ways her parents have failed to show her love or even affection.
If you are the kind of viewer who demands realism from your movies, this one will try your patience. There are at least a couple of events in this film (like what happens to Rodriguez's apartment, and those of you who've seen it know what I'm talking about) that not just strain credibility but try mighty hard to entirely break it. But the thing is, they don't. They feel credible within the world July creates in her movie, a world that's just a hair out of kilter with the world as we actually know it. And for me, everything worked.
Well, almost everything. I didn't love the lesbian themes that become increasingly prominent as the movie progresses, not because I have a problem with lesbian themes in general, but rather because they didn't feel well integrated into this particular story. But the movie is about loving and being loved in return, and there are all kinds of love, so in the end that too mostly worked for me.
Evan Rachel Wood is sensational, but this movie is stolen by, of all people, Gina Rodriguez. Who would ever have thought?
One of 2020's standout movies.
Grade: A