Phoenix stars in moving comedy-drama across US
It’s not a holiday movie by most definitions. But “C’mon C’mon” makes for ideal holiday theatergoing, as long as going to a theater’s in your pandemic wheelhouse.
It’d be compatible on a double bill with “Encanto,” of all things, so that an 11- or 12-year-old might experience two warm, family-centered, contrasting reminders that none of us are perfect but all of us deserve understanding. Writer-director Mike Mills’ film, starring Joaquin Phoenix as a public radio journalist who reenters his nephew’s life, garnered an R rating. Yet with a film expressing a sincere interest in how kids navigate difficult, unpredictable stretches of their lives, 11 or 12 seems fine to me.
This is a droll and extremely well-acted tale of a family in crisis, and in progress. If you can remember back before “Joker,” Phoenix boasts the range and the ambition to take on musical biopics (“Walk the Line”), peculiar futurist romantic comedy (“Her”) and plenty more. Here, in Mills’ most compact and conventionally shaped narrative to date, he plays Johnny, who’s between relationships, currently traveling the country on a radio project involving extensive interviews with children about the state of their country, lives and future.
Meantime New Yorkbased Johnny’s present tense is getting complicated. His semi-estranged LA sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) has a bright, challenging nine-year-old, Jesse (Woody Norman). Viv’s partner Paul (Scoot McNairy) has recently
taken a job with a Bay Area orchestra. Paul is bipolar, and Viv reluctantly asks Johnny to take Jesse for a while, so she can go help Paul through his latest period of adjustment.
“C’mon C’mon” takes Johnny and Jesse on an uncle/nephew odyssey, as they travel from New York to Detroit to New Orleans and back east again. Jesse’s coping mechanisms include extensive roleplay; he likes to pretend he’s an orphan on the run, looking for a place to call home. Instinctually Johnny gets Jesse interested in his audio equipment, and much of the sound design in Mills’ movie devotes time, and aural space, to the sounds Jesse captures using his uncle’s headphones and a directional microphone.
The storyline proceeds in a straight line, but true to form Mills’ preoccupations spin a web of flashbacks, interruptive asides, quotations from various writers. Also, and often, abrupt vignettes play out where something awkward or testy or charming happens to Johnny and Jesse. Then we’re suddenly overhearing Johnny (who keeps an audio diary) ruminate over mistakes made, or
moments of connection that linger. It can get a mite busy, and as with Mills’ previous films, notably “Beginners” and my favorite so far, “20th Century Women,” there’s an archness and nattering overelaboration at work and play, not always fruitfully. But never for long.
“C’mon C’mon” feels like a conscious step away from the ensemble sprawl of “20th Century Women.” Just when you grow frustrated with some of the developments, the actors get the breathing room and the material they need. For all his natural, off-center intensity Phoenix plainly loves working with, and responding to, other actors. Norman is terrific, in a role beaming in and out of idealized emotional reality; Hoffmann’s Viv, I believed every second, both as written and as acted.
MPAA rating: language)
Running time: 1:48 How to watch: Now in theaters
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