YOU CAN SAY THAT AGAIN
Samberg's new comedy puts a fresh spin on old, reliable device — the time loop
“Your best bet is just to learn how to suffer existence.”
It's not a line you'd expect from a movie positioned as an Andy Samberg comedy, but Palm Springs, much like the year of its release, is full of surprises.
The pitch is simple: Groundhog Day meets Wedding Crashers, as a tertiary guest of a woman's nuptials — Samberg plays Nyles, boyfriend of one of the bridesmaids — relives the big day over and over, creating havoc and revelling in the results.
The time loop at the centre of the story is similar to the one in Groundhog Day, but there are differences. And as that other movie taught us, anything different is good.
For one thing, when we first meet Nyles he's well into his hundredth or thousandth or maybe millionth iteration of
Nov. 9, the day of the wedding. This is a crucial, clever choice by screenwriter Andy Siara, since a steady diet of time loop movies and shows — Groundhog Day but also Happy Death Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code, Russian Doll, etc. — have most of us well versed in the mechanics of such things.
Another difference is that most time loops involve a single protagonist. But in the opening sequence of Palm Springs, sister of the bride Sarah (Cristin Milioti) accidentally gets caught in the same loop as Nyles, and now both of them wake up each morning on the same day as before. Physics tells us that two bodies provide many more possibilities than one. Add a third, and chaos theory makes the results unpredictable, which is just how I like my movies.
So while the background of the day remains the same — ceremony, drunkenness, infidelity, bad wedding speeches — the way the characters bounce off each other provides endless varieties of entertainment.
It helps that Nyles has been in the loop long enough to achieve some measure of resignation to his fate. “What might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present,” he tells Roy (J.K. Simmons), an occasional and mysterious guest at the wedding. Sarah has to learn the ropes, including the fact that in this loop you can keep the day going only as long as you can stay awake.
More cleverness can be found in the editing and pacing of Palm Springs, directed by feature first-timer Max Barbakow. There's a point midway through the movie where we learn something new that was (kind of) right in front of us the entire time.
And don't even get me started on Akupara, the Sanskrit name of the beer that Nyles seems to be surgically attached to throughout the movie, the fsst! of its opening timed for maximum comedic effect. (“I'm not a Puritan,” he notes of his hedonistic ways.)
Palm Springs debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, where streaming service Hulu brought it for a reported 17.5 million dollars and (tee hee) 69 cents, breaking the previous festival record by that small change. It opened in U.S. drive-ins and digitally in July, which explains its entrenched score of 94 per cent at rottentomatoes.com.
Now Canadians can finally have a look. It's definitely been worth the wait. I've already watched it twice, finding new depth the second time around. Like its cinematic cousin Groundhog Day, Palm Springs feels like a movie you could revisit many times. It's also difficult to imagine a film that better encapsulates the loopy feeling of living through a pandemic, minus the fear. It's one of the best and brightest things to come out of this benighted year.