Movie Breakdown: Kajillionaire (Noah)
Pre-Screening Stance:
There have only been two Miranda July-directed films – The Future and You, Me And Everyone We Know. I thought You, Me And Everyone We Know was adorable, if incomplete, and The Future was pretty unwatchable. I am, by definition, hit-and-miss on Miranda July. Thus, I approach Kajillionaire with a wary eye.
Post-Screening Ramble:
Miranda July is often times too twee for me. Her first two films (mentioned in the above paragraph) are either just cute enough to be forgettable or so overtly adorable and “surreal” that they rot your cinematic teeth out. I keep waiting for July to find the balance between her hipster charms and an actual cinematic backbone and I am happy to say, Kajillionaire seems to be a step in the right direction.
Evan Rachel Wood plays Old Dolio (the best name in a film all year), the daughter of two loser-creep-crooks – Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger (both in FINE form) – who’ve raised her without any sort of emotional coddling. She is – in character and performance – a blank slate with a robotic voice and little to no ambition outside the decrees of her parents. Enter Melanie (Jane the Virgin’s Gina Rodriguez), a stranger with a yen for weird adventure, who ingratiates herself into the family with a series of terrible “heists”. This is a film about what family means and what family does to us as people and what happens when we try to extricate ourselves from the only world we know. It is also a film about earthquakes, a wall that spits pink foam and something referred to as “the breast crawl.” It is, very much, a Miranda July film, but one that evolves from a patchwork series of entertaining, if decidedly plotless scenes, into a true story with narrative arcs and character development and a sweetly weird ending that made me smile. July does a fantastic job of placing Rodriguez’s Melanie and Wood’s Old Dolio on entirely different planes of existence, but still managing to paint a believable connection between the two. Rodriguez – all tough-girl patter and eyebrow raises – is fantastic in this film and the evolution of her character’s feelings towards the family and Old Dolio is a joy. At times Old Dolio is almost too much of a blank slate, a sort of emotional sieve who changes in such glacial fits and starts that she disappears in her scenes with the parents or Melanie. And maybe that’s the point – Old Dolio doesn’t exist until she comes into her own, outside of the bumbling, outright mean, parental guidance she receives.
That said, Kajillionaire is the Miranda July film I’ve been waiting for – all the weirdness of her early stuff, ably shaped into a real, satisfying piece of filmmaking.
One Last Thought:
Richard Jenkins continues to expand upon a certain strain of crotchety mischievousness. His attempts to woo Melanie in a hot tub he’s installed in the public bathroom of an office he rents as his home are perfect. Absolutely perfect.
