OPINION | REVIEW: Madcap eccentricities, strained affectations of 'Kajillionaire' not enough to spell success

Grifting along

Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood)‚ and her parents, Theresa (Debra Winger) and Robert Dyne (Richard Jenkins), are subsistence gleaners, scrounging and running petty grifts to survive in Miranda July’s “Kajillionaire.”
Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood)‚ and her parents, Theresa (Debra Winger) and Robert Dyne (Richard Jenkins), are subsistence gleaners, scrounging and running petty grifts to survive in Miranda July’s “Kajillionaire.”

Miranda July's work always consists of an odd combination of spices, like eating a casserole made by a mad chef, whose creativity sometimes outranks his ability to form cohesive flavors. Her films have a slightly deranged, arch quality even as they elicit an emotional response, rather like being trapped in a particularly offbeat series of New Yorker cartoons.

Her previous film, "The Future," about a couple living together whose lives splinter off into different timestreams, hit the right sort of meta physical notes among its various peculiarities, giving it a necessary counterweight and ballast to her more outré musings.

This film, which debuted at this year's Sundance to solid reviews, concerns a married couple of inveterate grifters in L.A., Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger), whose peculiarly disaffected daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), becomes further alienated when they -- somewhat randomly -- take on a new protegé, Melanie (Gina Rodriquez), in the midst of a big scam they've been planning for weeks.

This comes after raising Old Dolio from birth to be the consummate grifter ("She learned to forge before she learned to write," Robert tells Melanie, "well, actually, that's how she did learn to write") -- a playful perversion of the standard "raised-by-assassins" bit -- allowing her little to no chance of developing a personality beyond what her parents trained her to be (a bit in which she deftly sneaks into their local post office, acrobatically avoiding the security cameras, and scams the clerk in order to steal random mail packages, further plays on the trope).

For her part, Wood plays Old Dolio as if she'd been shut up in a laboratory her entire life, her chest-long hair blocking her face, her voice a weirdly deep growl. Denied any sort of parental affection by her parents ("I always thought it was insulting to treat you like a child," her father informs her), Old Dolio is a husk of a creature, there but for to do her parents' bidding like an automaton. When bubbly Melanie happily joins the crew, Old Dolio feels as if she's lost the only position she has ever held in the family. At first, she takes her feelings of betrayal out on Melanie, before she eventually attempts to break off from her ever-conspiratorial parents under the kind guidance of her former adversary, in order to cultivate her own fledgling sense of self.

As usual, the film is filled with July's penchant for creative whimsy -- the family lives in an old office space next to a soap factory, whose bubbles overflow and bleed down their walls at precise times of the day; they are singularly terrified of any kind of jostling, be it earthquake tremors, or flight turbulence -- but there's a more contrived quality to the proceedings than in her better work, as if everyone knowingly takes on their oddities rather than endure them naturally, and the character of Melanie, who factors mightily in what happens, is never more than a genial plot device (there is absolutely no indication, for example, of why this otherwise happy and grounded woman would want to have anything to do with this incredibly messed up family).

There are indeed some creative sparks, and inspired moments -- especially in a scene midway through, set in a darkened bathroom -- but despite the cast's full commitment to July's madcap eccentricities, the film doesn't manage to coalesce very much beyond its strained affectations.

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‘Kajillionaire’

85

Cast: Evan Rachel Wood, Gina Rodriguez, Richard Jenkins, Debra Winger, Da’Vine Joy Randolph

Director: Miranda July

Rating: R, for some sexual references/language

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

Playing theatrically

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