Miranda July (2020)
In present-day Los Angeles, Robert and Theresa Dyne and their daughter run a family business of sorts. They’re low-tech scammers and thieves; they steal packages from mailboxes, with a view to selling, or claiming a refund on, the contents – that kind of thing. Crime doesn’t pay well for the Dynes. They sometimes scavenge for food. The roof over their heads is that of a bubble factory, where they sleep on the floor of a disused office. They enter newspaper competitions in the hope of legitimate reward. In one way, though, their business is well established: Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger) have been petty criminals for decades. Their twenty-six-year-old daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), is named for a vagrant who got rich and famous late in life when he won the lottery. (The Dynes optimistically figured he might leave his money to a namesake; in the event, he spent his fortune before he died.) This is the modus vivendi her parents long ago chose and the only one their offspring has ever known – it seems odds against her achieving any kind of distance from the bizarrely claustrophobic family unit. Miranda July’s dramedy Kajillionaire turns into the story of how Old Dolio confounds those odds.
This being California, there are frequent earth tremors. July uses them as a dual metaphor – to evoke the precarity of the Dynes’ existence and the possibility of disturbing the status quo. (The ‘big one’ to which the tremors build results, for Old Dolio, in a spell of what she experiences as death-like darkness followed by an epiphany.) There are two major plot catalysts for change. Months behind with the rent on their primitive accommodation, the trio creeps along the factory exterior, bending low to the ground, in a vain attempt to avoid being noticed by the building manager (Mark Ivanir). Old Dolio devises, as a means of paying their debts, a lost-luggage-cum-travel-insurance scam that takes her and her parents on a brief round trip to New York City (travelling with tickets they won in a competition). On the plane, they meet vivacious Melanie (Gina Rodriguez) whom Robert and Theresa, to their daughter’s surprise, invite to join in the scam. This doesn’t come off as planned but Melanie remains part of the team when they return to Los Angeles. An optician’s assistant, she introduces the Dynes to elderly patients of the practice ripe for ripping off.
The second catalyst is ante-natal classes attended by Old Dolio, on behalf of an expectant mother unwilling to go herself but willing to pay a few dollars to a proxy. Here Old Dolio discovers the aberrant nature of her own upbringing. Her parents have nurtured in her a sense of fair play (what money they make is always split three ways) and a strong work ethic (the Dynes are no layabouts) but have also denied her conventional signs of love and affection. They’ve never bought her a birthday present or even used terms of endearment (that has to be the phrase with Debra Winger in the picture) when speaking to her. When Old Dolio challenges Theresa about this, the mother scornfully accuses the daughter of wanting parents who are feeble and phoney.
This is Miranda July’s third feature as writer-director, fifteen years after the first (Me and You and Everyone We Know) and nine since the second (The Future). In the meantime, she has kept busy as a writer and multimedia performance artist, and made occasional screen appearances – most recently, in Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline (2018). Me and You and Everyone We Know may have helped John Hawkes’ screen career and Hamish Linklater was a familiar face on American television by the time he starred opposite July in The Future but she has got together a much higher-profile cast to play the main roles in Kajillionaire. (Given how rarely she appears in films, Winger’s involvement is a particular coup.) The integrity of the acting, combined with July’s evident empathy with eccentrics, prevents the Dynes from being merely cute criminals – a relief to this viewer. It’s not much of a plus, though, when the main characters, except for Melanie, are predominantly dismal instead.
Besides, July doesn’t resist creating an emphatically wacky visual and musical environment for them – in the clouds of roseate foam coursing down the walls of the bubble factory, in the liberal use of Emile Mosseri’s quirky score. (Mosseri’s music for Minari is recognisably the work of the same composer but less intrusive.) Bobby Vinton’s 1960s hit single ‘Mr Lonely’, repeatedly heard as an instrumental during Kajillionaire then with Vinton’s vocals over the closing credits, reinforces the soundtrack’s cloying whimsicality.
As soon as Melanie arrives on the scene, Robert and Theresa treat her differently from how they treat their daughter – when Melanie gets upset they console her and call her ‘hon’ – but I couldn’t fathom why, except that it significantly influences Old Dolio’s attitude towards her parents. Assuming Robert and Theresa have never previously recruited an outsider, I didn’t understand either why they start now (beyond the fact that, again, it’s crucial to the plot). While Old Dolio is at an ante-natal class, her parents propose a threesome to Melanie, though without success – is this a new departure for them? July obviously didn’t set out to create a work of rigorous realism but I think her ‘surrealism’ – as some critics call it – could also be termed incoherence. It’s certainly confusing.
The Dynes are a pathologically close-knit family and Old Dolio is clearly on the receiving end of an abusive relationship of sorts. Introducing her parents’ sexual tastes into the mix, through their proposition to Melanie, has the effect of raising – or, rather, renewing – questions in your mind as to exactly what sort of abuse Old Dolio’s been the victim of. Early on in the film, she goes to a massage parlour, intending to cash in a voucher for a session there. When the proprietor, Jenny (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), says no, Old Dolio reluctantly agrees to have the session, and lies on the massage table fully dressed. She can’t, however, bear Jenny to touch her. Her uniform of oversized sweatshirt and jogging bottoms, like her swag of long, lank hair, seem designed to cover as much of her face and body as possible, as if she’s in purdah. Theresa’s clothes and, especially, her hair are very similar to Old Dolio’s her daughter’s. I couldn’t help wondering if July was implying Robert might have treated his wife and daughter as two of a kind. She probably isn’t but she doesn’t definitely rule it out and does make use of abuse-victim tropes in the way she presents Old Dolio (who also avoids eye contact).
The young woman’s predicament may be intended, rather, as a black comedy exaggeration of parents refusing to let their child attain individuality and independence – but why does that also entail withholding affection? Increasingly distressed by that, Old Dolio accepts Melanie’s invitation to stay in her apartment. Absence makes the heart grow fonder: Robert and Theresa turn up at Melanie’s with seventeen birthday presents for their daughter, promising another at a dinner arranged for the following evening. They prove not to be reformed characters – there’s another, major theft, as well as another present, to come – but the film ends hopefully. In the last scene, Old Dolio and Melanie go to a supermarket to get refunds on the birthday presents. The last shot is a prolonged kiss between them, summing up Old Dolio’s breakthrough into achieving physical contact (including eye contact), into a relationship with someone other than her mother and father.
The best episode in Kajillionaire – perhaps the only one that achieves emotional substance as well as compelling attention – is a visit to the home of one of Melanie’s boss’s patients – bedridden man, close to death. He asks the Dynes and Melanie to pretend to be his family in the minutes before he slips into oblivion. Theresa gets out tea things, Robert talks about mowing the lawn, and so on. Acceding to an extraordinary request, they suddenly seem within touching distance of normality. The playing here is admirably naturalistic – and Miranda July, for once, stops reminding the viewer how off-the-wall things are. For the most part, her insistence on this gives her film-making a viscous quality. Kajillionaire isn’t long film but it’s very slow-moving. It had its British premiere on the first night of last year’s London Film Festival. I was keen to see it then but it clashed with The Disciple – I opted for Chaitanya Tamhane’s film because I thought there might be a longer wait for it to become available online subsequently (as there was). I don’t regret the choice I made a few months ago. The Disciple isn’t an easy watch but it’s worth the effort. Despite the contributions of some fine actors, I’m not sure the same can be said for Kajillionaire.
27 April 2021
