‘Kajillionaire’ humanizes grifters

A codependent family of scammers tops DVD releases for the week of Dec. 22.

“Kajillionaire”: Writer-director Miranda July (“The Future,” “Me and You and Everyone We Know”) continues her singularly empathic look into offbeat lives, this time following a family of Los Angeles grifters. Residing in an office space next to a soap factory, complete with overflowing bubbles they must scrape off the walls as a daily chore, parents Robert and Theresa (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger) and daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) commit forgeries and cons just to barely get by.

After an unintended run-in with the landlord and the family needing rent money fast, Old Dolio concocts a scheme in which the family will fly to New York and back, parents pretending not to know their daughter upon return, and find an accomplice to take Old Dolio’s luggage so she can blame the disappearance on the airline and collect a travel insurance check. But as her parents find their target, the posh Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), she quickly charms them into including her in future endeavors. And Old Dolio, who pretends to be a mother and attends early childhood seminars in her spare time, is unsettled by the family addition.

Old Dolio desperately wants to know what it’s like to feel parented, and her want is the heartbeat of the film.

As always, July offers her characters an almost primal sense of humanity in what some parents can ultimately give their children, what they can’t, and the importance of finding one’s own chosen family in the meantime.