Matt Kennedy / Focus Features
There are two half-interesting moments in Kajillionaire, the oddball film directed by Miranda July about a family of misfits trying to get by in LA. Sadly both scenes occur within the first twenty minutes, leaving the rest of the film to gurn through unrewarded. Evan Rachel Wood plays Old Dolio, an emo woman-child with a deep voice and no friends, who has spent her whole miserable existence trailing after her nasty parents and helping them con people out of minuscule amounts of money.
Old Dolio has never known affection and is so allergic to tenderness that when she goes for a massage on a whim, her whole body convulses under the hands of her spooked masseuse. (That's the first of the two good scenes.) Old Dolio's mother (Debra Winger) has her daughter's grim curtains of ironed hair, as well as her instinctive horror of strangers. Both are kept in line by the paterfamilias (Richard Jenkins) who is as lugubrious as they are - mustachioed, lecherous, up to his eyeballs in conspiracy theories.
Matt Kennedy / Focus Features
The trio split the rent on an office next to a bubble factory, sleeping between desks every night and spending their days roaming around the city for cash. Sometimes the wall nearest the factory starts to weep expressively, loosing great swags of pink foam towards the floor. But Old Dolio is used to this: she uses a bucket and brush to collect the bubbles before they invade the family's makeshift bedroom. (That's the second of the two decent scenes.)
I imagine the film was financed in the hope that it would turn out to be crazy-kooky, weird-but-charming, a sleeper indie hit, bamboozling but ultimately moving. It’s none of these things. It’s just wan and boring and annoying, with a lead actress who is as boldly unconvincing as her lines. The plot, however, has promise: the film tiptoes towards becoming a heist, without showing the courtesy, of course, of actually becoming a heist.
Matt Kennedy / Focus Features
The mischief kicks off in earnest when Old Dolio's parents befriend Melanie, a beautiful Puerto Rican who loves her iPhone, on a flight to New York. For reasons the film absolutely does not clarify, Melanie is attracted to the couple and their eerie tracksuit-swaddled daughter. For the remainder of the film, Melanie trots around after Old Dolio and her parents, cheerfully offering up her acquaintances as potential victims of their loser frauds. Gradually, and to no one's surprise, Melanie and Old Dolio fall in love, bonding over the basics: pancakes, bedroom dancing, supermarket checkouts.
Gina Rodriguez, who plays Melanie, is a joy to watch, filling out a character who can't have been easy to play with believable warmth and pep. Still, even she can't rescue this drowning damsel of a film. To be actively avoided.
ONE STAR
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October 09, 2020 at 09:46PM
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Kajillionaire film review - Tatler
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