KAJILLIONAIRE (C) - There was a moment in time for Miranda July. That era probably was the 1980s (but she was still a kid then), so we settled for the retro version that she presented a decade ago as an adult. But time has not been kind to her manic-pixie take on the world that she offered up so effortlessly back in the Before Times. Something seems stale.
July, a wry writer and occasional filmmaker, splashed with the witty and deadpan "Me and You and Everyone We Know" in 2005 and followed it up in 2011 with the quietly charming relationship film "The Future" -- which gave us a talking cat named Paw-Paw (voiced by July) as one of the main characters -- but hadn't produced a film since. Now in her mid-40s, it seems her moment in cinema may have aged out of the system.
Her cutesy idea here is to create a bizarro family of socially dysfunctional grifters and see if they can out-outre each other. She doesn't so much assemble a cast as take hostages -- powerhouses Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger as the cruelly unemotional parents and the way-past-her-prime Evan Rachel Wood as their abuse-victim daughter, whom they have charmlessly named Old Dolio, after a homeless man who they thought was going to bequeath them some money somehow. They live in an office-building connected to a factory, where waves of pink bubbles constantly seep through the walls, because -- well, because it's just one of July's fairy-dust brainstorms.
This has all the hallmarks of established actors indulging an avant-garde filmmaker by work-shopping her half-baked ideas and seeing if anything sticks. Jenkins and Winger give it their all (digging deep, I'm sure, into their '70s Method training), and they try not to seem embarrassed in their obviously out-sized but under-sketched roles. Wood affects a husky grumble of a 20-something who was raised by wolves and knows only one thing -- how to scam money in order to pay for the next meal. But she shows little range or ability to connect with Gina Rodriguez as Melanie, who comes along to help rescue Old Dolio from this suffocating existence.
Melanie is meant to represent empathy and humanity here, but she comes off as little more than a narrative device, almost a Magical Minority, who unconvincingly is powerfully drawn to her very own Eliza Doolittle. But Rodriguez, too, is victimized by July's inability to flesh out what could have been a fine short story into a feature-length movie, as well as July's failure to literally piece together a convincing fully-realized film. July attempts to convey a washed-out L.A. but shows none of the flair of Sean Baker or others who can use a camera to make their images come alive. July is a huge talent as a writer and performance artist/curator, but this tale of a family of emotionally stunted oddballs lays bare her own arrested development as a filmmaker.
BONUS TRACK
Besides a well-placed Bobby Vinton song (!), July finds interesting sounds, including this piano piece, "Melusine," from her college pal Summer Mastous:
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